First Love: Fandango’s Dog Days of August, Aug 18

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Then and Now

First Love

Zing! went our heartstrings. Zang! went our souls.
Eyes filled with wonder, hearts cupped like bowls
ready to fill  with passion and love.
Putting each other on like a glove.

First kisses miracles we’d never known.
No longer single all on our own.
Someone to cuddle, someone to spoon.
Hand holds and lip locks over too soon.

Misunderstandings, squabbles and fights.
Heartbreak and lonely Saturday nights.
Then a new glance from cars “U”ing  main.
Flirting and wooing all over again.

More hugs and kisses parked on a hill.
How to forget them? We never will.
At school reunions, we relive those lives,
husbands beside us, or boyfriends or wives.

Talking of other things: study halls, games,
but always remembering carving those names
in desktops and memory—first loves forever—
tendrils that bind us that we cannot sever.

We’ll soar ahead to the rest of our lives,
collecting new memories—bees in our hives.
But no honey finer than that we made first.
No sweeter lips and no stronger thirst.

Stored in our hearts, remembered but hidden,
hoarded like treasures sealed in a midden,
our lives are made richer by both now and then.
Past memories opening over again

spill out old secrets, then seal them away
to be unwrapped on some future day
when old schoolmates meet for two days’ reminiscing
of school pranks and ballgames and homework. And kissing.

 

 

This is a reblog of a poem from four yers ago For FDDA :First Love

27 thoughts on “First Love: Fandango’s Dog Days of August, Aug 18”

    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Ha.. His name was Billy and he was a scallawag. He lived across the street from me. His dad was the local undertaker. I think they were the first family in town to get a TV. There wasn’t even a TV station to transmit reception yet, but we used to go over and watch the test pattern.. ha. My dad didn’t think TV would work so he refused to pre-subscribe to get the station built. One day we heard a big boom and found out Billy was fooling around with his dad’s shotgut and blew a hole through his wall into his sister Karley’s room, just missing her head. That was the big news for the year. Everyone had to go see the hole in the wall. Luckily, it wasn’t in Karley. His mom was a wonderful outgoing woman who taught English at the high school but sadly passed away when we were in jr. high and his dad moved the family away to a town 40 miles away. I last saw Billy at our 100th year town reunion that coincided with our all-school reunion 13 years ago.

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      1. rugby843's avatarrugby843

        What is Billy doing now? Hopefully he’s not shooting guns anymore! Thanks for the response. I’m always interested in these characters and it sounds like he was a great one!

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            1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

              I live in central Mexico and my hometown is in northern U.S. but I think I’ve been to every reunion except one or two. My school does them every five years for all the classes together. The town was too small to warrant having them for individual classes. Twenty or less in my graduating class.

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    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Yes.. Thanks to my sisters who captured most of these early black and white shots, and to Nancy Parish, the little girl across the street that I met again at a school reunion 13 years ago who sent me the colored shot of my family, her family and other neighbors. She also later came down and visited me in Mexico. She had not been born when this photo was taken, but her two brothers are in the photo.

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          1. koolkosherkitchen's avatarkoolkosherkitchen

            Astonishing, if you think about time that has gone by. Getting and e-mail from him doesn’t surprise me. I have an uncle who is 92. He is on Skype and WhatsApp, and a million other things, and he is the connection between us cousins who are scattered all over the world.

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            1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

              I was going to go see him this year.. One of many plans flown out the window. I’ve only seen him twice–well, three times in my life. In that photo of me sitting on the front of our car–we were on our way to see his family . I was too little to remember anything except a squirrel running along a branch and a little dog running out of his mom’s house straight at me and biting me! I had to go to the dr. and get a shot and I was frightened of dogs for a few years until I was seven and fell in love with the across-the-street neighbor’s dog.

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