First Kiss

1969: Skinny and small for my age, I looked even younger than my 13 years, and despaired of ever looking like the girls who filled the pages of my older sisters’ Seventeen and Cosmo magazines. Within a year, the anti-war rallies would be going strong in Vancouver, BC. That year, though, the war seemed far away from our neighborhood, with its tall narrow houses crowded cheek by jowl near the city’s inner harbor. Two doors down from us lived a family that had something very unique, at least in my experience: a bomb shelter.

The Drikos family had three boys, two of whom were just slightly older than me. Their mother yelled at them a lot, so we tended to know more than we needed to about their comings and goings. I’d gone with the other neighborhood kids to look through the bomb shelter when their Dad finished it, and was impressed by the amount of food and emergency stuff it contained. The concept was completely alien to me, though, and my parents thought it was pretty extreme.

I considered the two younger boys bullies, and tried to avoid them as much as possible. Chris, the oldest, was different. He was always kind to me, even though I was much younger. He must have been eighteen or nineteen that year – old enough to be outside the orb of my attention. One hot summer day I was sitting up on my front porch, enjoying the afternoon shade, when Chris came up and sat beside me on the top step.

“I’ve joined up,” he said. “I’m going to Vietnam.”

I did not know what he meant, so he had to lay it out for me: he had joined the U.S. Army, and was heading to boot camp the following week. Why the U.S. and not Canadian? He said he wanted to serve where he was most needed.

Chris was a good looking young man, blond and tanned. He was strong, too – the Drikos’ had a weight set in their basement, and Chris had put in his time on it. I was very much aware of his arm near mine, sun-bleached hairs brushing my elbow as we chatted. When he put his hand behind my head and pulled my face to his I was both unprepared and unresisting. My first kiss. When it ended, Chris got up and tousled my hair before walking back to his own house. He left a few days later, then a short while after that his family moved, and my attention was drawn to other things. I never saw Chris again, but I have not forgotten that kiss.

Mary Campbell
Oak Harbor

Photograph courtesy of Mary Campbell. All rights reserved.