The Fathered Five Story, Part One: Smitten
Part 1: Smitten | Part 2: Burned
How does a guy come to be the father of five and then to blog about it? I never claim to know what I’m doing; only that I have lots of experience doing it. All you never wanted to know about Fathered Five.
My die was cast, though I didn’t know it at the time, when I was about 11 or 12 and the family of Mothered Five moved into my neighborhood. She was one year younger. She went to my school and was good friends with my younger sister and actually spent quite a bit of time at my house. Oddly, though, I have no recollection of her until I was about 14 and sprouted body hair and a changing voice. I don’t remember the moment, but I imagine there must have been a time when I opened the door to her knock like I had many times before and noticed her for the first time. She was cute! Maybe I watched her walk down the hall toward my sister’s bedroom. Maybe I heard heralds announcing my destiny.
I was kind of a dorky kid at the time. Short for my age, less sense of style than I have now, which isn’t much. I cared little about my appearance and spent little time on hygiene, to say nothing of social skills. I spent hours in my room listening to my brother’s music from the 60s and 70s (for which I thank him to this day). How I gained her attention, I’ll never know. By default, I guess: I was the only boy her age who lived at her best friend’s house. I was clearly interested, so she responded, probably out of flattery. Pubescent hormones will do funny things to a girl’s brain. It must have been hormones. There’s no other explanation, as I think you’ll agree when you consider this picture, taken my junior year during a school choir trip to California.
We negotiated the little rituals by which kids signal that they like each other and started “going together.” That was a big deal in Junior High. It meant we had some sort of agreement that we were an item. That our friends could harass us with, “Joe lu-uvs Kim,” and we had to take it quietly because it was true. That’s about all it meant.
I remember the first time I held her hand. We were sitting side by side watching “The Great Divide.” The tension was so thick you could swim in it and our hands sloooowly came closer together. I fought and urged myself and sweat and fretted and finally mustered up the courage to reach over and take her hand and—stopped partway there! She didn’t meet me halfway! What did this mean? Now my forearm was resting on hers and what was I supposed to do with that? I looked at her with a smirk, hoping for some encouragement. She watched the screen stonily. I couldn’t just leave my arm there on hers so moved to take her hand again. This time she turned hers to meet mine and, oh! I knew heaven in that instant. Success! Nothing in my 14 years of experience could compare to this. It was even better than doubling my dexterity score with a perfect die roll in Dungeons and Dragons! I had discovered the secret key to awesome.
I felt forces stirring then that would come to define my life, however indirectly. Old forces that had moved my father and his father before him and back through endless time, the one element of humanity that is as old as the Earth. I knew nothing of that, of course. All I knew was that she was a girl, that she had bumps and soft skin and that I was holding her hand! That’s it, and it was enough. If I asked nothing more of life, I felt, it had delivered more than I ever expected.
