Autobiographical Memoir Moments

The first was a visceral reaction, while nursing along side my younger brother. I became aware of an erection, with no vocabulary at all. There is a memory of the sensation, puzzlement, a desire to know more, and a visual image of my baby brother at the other breast.




There were birthday parties, stuffed bunnies, birthday cakes, a sense of celebration, outdoors, sunshine, and also indoors. Blowing out candles and singing joined with friendliness and safety.



Then, in sixth grade there was a lively girl named Alice Martin, with the only two budding tits in the whole grade school. So, in character, the sixth grade boys would pinch their shirts in the appropriate places and pull them forward while they leaned backward and walked around saying, “Here comes Alice!”



I happily accepted my first ‘Mission Impossible’, which was to observe Alice from a distance during recess, in my Superman alter ego, just to be certain she was always safe from harm. And as long as I was watching, she always was!



In junior High School I encountered my first ever live girl friend (there was a lovely ‘crush’ before that with a preacher’s daughter who lived just across the street with her parents and two sisters). Her name was Bonnie and she sat in the desk behind mine in Home Room. The class and the teacher did a lot of ‘out loud’ reading in homeroom. Bonnie would slide down in her chair and extend her amazing legs until her saddle shoes with her feet inside were directly under my desk and me. It was comfortable for her, and irresistible for me. I would seize her feet with mine and hold her silently while the ‘out loud’ reading session went on. Some times she would struggle in a fierce, friendly feminine way to free herself from my forceful control, but always without ‘success’!

We talked and took walks together after school, and when we graduated Junior High School I gifted her with my solid gold valedictorian award pin received at the Honors Assembly. Just after summer break Bonnie and her family moved away from Albuquerque and I never saw her again (physically). She mailed my gold pin back to me at the end of the summer with a polite feminine Dear Robert letter, and we each went on to High School in different parts of the world.

Albuquerque in autumn and winter has nights that go from chilly to cold. During this time our junior high football team played under the lights at Milne Stadium, named for a former superintendent of schools in Albuquerque. I was the manager of the football team and always attended the games on the sidelines with the team and the cheerleaders. As sportswriter for our school paper it was also my job to report each game, with school spirit and perception- in the next issue. Great work, if you can ‘get it’ and I did. The cheerleaders in their short skirts frequently got cold at the games, and would come over to where I had posted myself, to warm their hands and fingers inside my various pockets. About that time, I think I coined the now famous phrase, “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it!”



The cheerleaders, unlike Bonnie, went on to High School with me, and were joined there by still more cheerleaders. By then, I was no longer manager of the athletic teams, but maintained my rapport with the cheerleaders by joining the marching band (euphonium player) and also helping them to pass their more difficult exams, in class.



High School in those days was not only pre facebook it was Pre Playboy!

My older sister and my younger brother and I lucked into some really great DNA and our Mom, who told the church visitors when they came to recruit her as a church member, “I believe I am living right here, right now, for the only time” made sure my brother and I were enrolled and attended regularly at First Baptist Church by asking a neighbor across the street to take us to church with her!

By the time I graduated High School I was an enthusiastic deacon, and a song leader (hymns) for youth revivals in New Mexico and Colorado.

Gradually over the next fifty years I learned that each moment has its own dos and don’ts and its alternatives . . .