A boy once asked me, while we were sitting in his car, alone, if I played baseball much? A few hours later I realized he was asking me why he couldn't get to first base.

Ms. Bryan was my English teacher during my senior year of high school.  If she could read my blog now, I am sure that my incessant grammatical errors and redundant usage of the same words would cause her to bow her head in defeat and cry tears of mourning for all the lost time spent trying to teach me that she could have put to better use by filing her nails or catching up on her sleep.


In one of those classes, Ms. Bryan assigned us a paper that was to be written in the form of categorization.  We were to choose a subject and categorize it.  Some students chose to write about basketball and categorize different strategies.....zzzzzzz.....  I'm sorry, did I doze off?  Some students chose to display their very adult nature and categorize the quality and dreaminess of Keanu Reeves films.  


I chose to pay tribute to my uncontrollable need to stand out in a crowd by writing a paper about kissing.  There were the wet kisses, the passionate kisses, the stiff, grandma-style kisses, and on it went.  I wrote furiously, my hand unable to keep up with my brain, and in the end, I was able to turn in a paper that I was sure would please the discriminating Ms. Bryan.  


Ms. Bryan informed us all at the start of the year that she could probably count on one hand the number of papers that she had given a score of 100% in her entire, lengthy career.  She was of the mind that a paper written by a high-school girl or boy could not be perfect, and she would only give us the credit that we deserved.  I had to agree with her, and soon realized that a desire to please her usually gave me what I needed to warrant scores consistently in the 90's.  I would still love to hear the bragging of one of her students who was given the elusive 100%.  I hope they saved the paper and had it matted and framed.


When our categorization papers were returned, I proudly admired the "98%" written in the upper right corner of mine.  Ms. Bryan told the class that we had collectively done well, and that if anyone wanted to read a truly great essay, they should see me and read my paper on kissing.  I can still hear her speak that sentence in my mind.  I was Lord of the Class.  That praise was as good as a perfect score.  Maybe better.  I'm sure that had I not used a comma where I should have used a semi-colan, I would now have a neatly typed essay hanging on my living room wall, displaying it's glorious 100%  written in red in the corner.  So close. 



Nobody swallowed their pride and asked if they could read what I had written, and it's probably good that they didn't, because I'm certain I would have been discovered.  You see, at that point in my life I had kissed all of five boys, and three of them don't really count.  I sneaked up on one of them in the dark of the backstage during a drama performance of "Cinderella: One Woman's Story" to plaster his poor, unsuspecting mouth with an unsolicited kiss from an older girl; another boy I must have kissed on a dare - I don't really remember the circumstances, just that his lips were surprisingly mushy, and the third we'll-count-it-for-argument's-sake kiss was during a production of "Tony and Tina's Wedding", where I kissed my stage husband because we both agreed that stage kissing looked ridiculously fake, and we were die-hard professionals who would settle for nothing but the most believable reality.  So there you have it.  Two people that I had genuinely kissed, and I was writing papers about all different kinds.  I watched a lot of movies though, and if that didn't qualify me, then what would?  Oh, yeah.  Actually kissing.  Right.


Well, here's the sad or admirable truth, depending on how you look at it:  My stats have not changed since that day.  I was 17 years old when I wrote that paper.  I am now 29 years old, and I have still only kissed those five boys.  Of course, I've been married for nearly ten years now, but what did I do with all my time before that?  I can't figure out if I was prude, naive, undesireable or just not that kind of girl.  Whatever the case, I still earned a 98% when writing about a topic that I obviously knew nothing about.  Some girls have memories of former loves and passionate smooches to keep them company at night.  I've got my first kiss lying next to me.  Take that!