Airplanes

I lost my virginity on the floor of a modified Cessna 182 on or about my sixteenth birthday. I say on or about because I'm no longer certain when was what and that doesn't matter so much anyway.

Except he was thirty-two. I hear this is supposed to be a bad thing. I'm still looking for the bad but I'm not sure I'll ever be able to see it. In retrospect, as a parent, the very thought is horrifying but then I'm not bringing my children up the way my parents brought me. Not in any way, shape or form.

We have rules, social mores, if you will, that we apply given our circumstances. But what happens when the cultures clash so thoroughly that the mores just can't jive, no matter how you twist or turn or spin them about?

I was a young adult in the body of a child. Puberty came late (some would argue that I'm still waiting). Children don't jump out of airplanes. If you are sixteen years old and you are exiting the body of a 182 at 9 grand you are not a child; I don't care what the rest of your life looks like. You are not a child or you are dead. That doesn't mean I wasn't a child. It just means what it means. Conflict, you know?

I like to say it ruined me for boys my own age except it didn't. I just never learned how to talk to them or maybe they just never could talk to me. I imagine I might have been marginally daunting. All this skydiving and no talking and me the ice queen because I hadn't learned to speak yet.

What I do wonder though, finally after all these years, is what on earth was he thinking?

Then, and only then, I stop and say ewe. But I still can't find the wrong or bad on my end and you know what? Maybe that's OK.