Perfect Pass
I've been doing morning writing projects where I pick a random topic and write until I seize on a memory and then scribble about it in as much detail as I can remember. For example, a couple days ago my topic was swimming pools and I wrote about swimming in RB's pool with the yellow fish on the bottom way back when I was in about 2nd grade.

Today's topic was boyfriends and I wrote about my first boyfriend FR. A lot of details were fuzzy which is probably a good thing. I vaguely recall meeting him around that elementary school in Oak Park I think AZ and I did gymnastics on the lawn over there. I don't remember how we (me and FR) ever ended up going together.

This was when I was 16 and for our first major "date" we went to the beach. I think a large part of my appeal to him was that fact that I had a car. I guess he must have been used to going to the beach with the guys because the first thing we did was play catch with a football. This is what I get for dating a jock, the one and only jock of my dating career. Look at my wee girl hands. I can barely hold a football, much less throw it. He'd drive a hard pass at me which I'd catch (sometimes, if I kept my eyes open) with a THWUMP that knocked the wind out of me and painfully smashed my boobs. I'd dutifully lob it back. He must have gotten tired of it landing about 6 feet in front of him because we switched to Frisbee.

How do you aim a Frisbee? I'm sure it's possible since there are Frisbee games that require a certain level of precision and other people seem to enjoy throwing and catching them. Even dogs can catch them. Not me. I am bad at throwing and catching things. Again, like a sport, I'd give it a whirl and it would float off on a course of its own, yards away from my target. Or else it would flop straight down in a spray of sand. He'd run after it, pick it up and spin it back and it would float gently straight for me, bounce off my forehead and into the sand in front of me.

You can see why we ended up eating grapes and mashing on the blanket.

As I wrote this I grew a tad embarrassed, thinking that if I had such a date now, I would probably apologize for being "so lame" but at the time I was so stressed out about how to act on a first date it didn't occur to me that I was anything less than a perfectly fun time. Then I thought, WTF -- do you think he felt apologetic for clobbering me with a football? What kind of guy plays football with a date, anyway? Shouldn't he have been apologizing for not wanting to hang out in the beach chairs reading Great Expectations (me, junior honors English) and Tom Sawyer Cliff Notes (him, sophomore remedial)?