Facebook memories remind me every day that my children have gotten huge over the past two years. Like every parent, I want things to slow down a bit. Selfishly, it’s because I still live vicariously through them. What I would give to be nine again! Much like my son, at that age, you couldn’t pull me off my bike. If given the option between walking 50 yards or riding 50 yards on my bike, I’d take the bike every time. Nothing moved fast enough at that age, but now that we are older, we just want things to slow down. We take the scenic route when we can and chew a little slower to savor the flavor of life.
My son got invited to his very first sleepover party. Mind you, he was only 1.4 miles away, but it was a big deal. There were Super Soaker and water balloon battles, an insane amount of video game playing and cake! They had cake! Oh and nachos for dinner! WIN! (Imagine those details in his voice!) We got the countdown every day from him. “Three days till the party! I am so excited”. It was also the cap to a pretty fun summer that took us from NASA to Disneyland to Little Rock and beyond. We had a pretty active summer, but this sleepover was to be the cherry on top and Friday afternoon couldn’t get here fast enough for Sean!
My twelve year old daughter saw this as a huge opportunity. School was going to start on Monday and with her brother out of the house, she could throw her own sleepover party with a couple of girls from her class. Anytime you can have a group of friends over without your handsome, attention grabbing brother there to potentially embarrass you, you take that shot! I was never a twelve year old girl, so I don’t understand the reason for high pitched screaming, but when you put several of them (or at least three) in one room, screaming is mandatory. Why?
They camped out in the living room on couches and cots and binge watched a bunch of Japanese anime. Anime-another thing I don’t get. Add that to the list! Here’s basically what happened from 6pm to 3am in the morning-Every 45 seconds you’d hear a blood curdling scream followed by uncontrollable laughter. Then, they would occasionally sing something. Maybe a real song. Sometimes a parody. Why did it stop at 3am? Not because they were tired of screaming! It ended because my wife finally had “enough” and yelled at them to go to my daughter’s bedroom. I woke up at 6:30am to take the dog out and I heard them still talking. They screamed, sang, laughed and screamed till the next morning. Absolutely not sleep. Girls are weird.
These sleepover parties stirred up nostalgia to the days of the one and only, non-college or adult, sleepover party that I hosted. It was the last day of school and we were headed into 8th grade next year (8th grade in my hometown meant high school-small town Texas living!). Time to celebrate! I invited a small group of buddies over for the night. Just the guys that I thought would be cool with a night of tents, bonfires, hot dogs, s’mores, farting and making fun of people. Typical junior high stuff and reminiscent of the movie Stand by Me (Love that movie! Wrote an earlier blog about it).
It was just going to be five guys talking about baseball, football, dude stuff and all the girls they would totally kiss if ever given the opportunity. The tent was pitched, fire was burning, hot dogs and s’mores were roasted and then….my older brother Michael came out of the house to hang out with us. My friends thought he was cool because he was in high school and was actually hanging out with us on a Friday night. Little did they know, the only reason he was hanging out with us was because he only had his learners permit and was kind of stuck at the house for the evening.
Michael sat down, threw a log on the fire and said the seven words that completely changed the tempo and theme of my sleepover party.
“You guys wanna go see some girls”?
Five hormonally-awkward boys sitting around a fire and the one guy with an armpit full of hair just asked us if we wanted to go see some girls. Things escalated quickly! I liked girls, but I knew that the girls he wanted to go see were older than me, lived more than two miles away and would have much rather smooched my older, more mature and armpit hair having brother than his younger, freckled-faced no armpit hair having doughy-bodied brother. At that age I was often referred to as “cute” or “such a nice kid” or “Mike’s kid brother”. Also, I am a rule follower and I know mom would have frowned upon that long distance journey to the “house of girls”. So, as expected, I stayed behind, while three of my guests and my brother Michael grabbed flashlights and headed into the night in search of girls to smooch.
Turns out, I wasn’t the only one having a sleepover party that evening. Michael had heard that our friend Melainie was hosting a bunch of high school girls and that was his destination for the evening. With or without his brother or his brother’s friends, he was going to end up at her house that evening! He just needed some traveling companions and possibly a few less appealing options for the ladies. The best way to become the most sought after guy in a room is to bring a bunch of awkward, scrappy and slightly younger guys as your entourage. Automatically you are the funniest, best looking and most suitable option for smooching. (It’s a scientific fact. Look it up. Animal Planet has programs on this stuff).
So, as I was throwing sticks and old firecrackers into the campfire and talking about the girls I’ll never kiss, my brother and his entourage of lost boys were chatting it up with the ladies. I am sure they had refreshments and snacks and music playing. Girl parties are always more organized. The girls were probably laughing at things that were not all that funny, while my lone friend and I were looking to see if our farts were catching fire.
You see, I don’t really remember what happened at my sleepover because the real story of the night was happening two miles away at Melainie’s house. This story of this night will be forever known as The Legend of the Girl who never kissed a Boy Before! Not the legend of the epic farts in the campfire or the epic game of capture the flag that never happened! This evening birthed a story that has lived on beyond my brother’s passing and is still told and referenced when a select group of us get together. Hard to believe, this story is 30+ years old!
I cannot share the complete details of the evening (because I wasn’t there!) but my brother Michael pulled off what was one of the slickest moves in the history of boys going through puberty. I heard the story directly from my brother hours after it happened (because they eventually came back to my house), the retelling from my friends as we laid down in the tent, and from the decades of references that have been made by those who were there or had learned of the legend.
You see, this girl had never kissed a boy before (hence the name of the story) and made a point of telling Michael this about 2.3 seconds before he ended her cold streak. He leaned in, and without missing a beat, said “It ain’t that hard” and then laid a long and wet one on her.
To somewhat alter a quote from the movie The Sandlot: “Michael Murphy had kissed a woman. And he kissed her long and good”.
He was smooth, quick witted and when it came to girl smooching, he was without pause. All he needed was an opening. For a group of guys trying to figure out the opposite sex, or when our first whisker was going to appear on our chins, Michael made it look easy because he seized the moment and leaned into uncertainty. He had many missteps in life and was often difficult to understand, but when it came to grabbing a moment by the horns (or in this case, the lips) he was the envy of everyone I knew. We all remember our own first kiss, but how many remember the legend of someone else’s? Without trying to be anything he wasn’t, he taught many of us how to live in the moment.
You don’t always have to be a rule follower. Leave yourself open to experiences and #Tryharder to take that two mile hike into the night! You never know what epic adventures await. Remember, legendary campfire stories are not told about people sitting around a campfire talking about things they wish they could do; they are told about the people who took the opportunity to make history.
