👩❤️💋👨 TREE 618: JG – love and kissing
Last week you read how I learned to be content with the possibility that I might be single forever. Christine and I got together less than a year after that, so my contentedness was never tested.
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In 1993 when I was 19, I helped lead a team of teenagers from my church in Tucson, Arizona on a mission trip to an ex-coal-mining village in the valleys of South Wales. I met Christine and liked her immediately. I liked her so much that it took me two weeks to work up the courage to ask her if I could take a photo of her.
I fell in properly love with Christine two years after I met her, which is probably about right because she was grown up all the way to seventeen-and-a-half. I was twenty-one. She was already in love with me. I asked her to marry me in the middle of a long, abandoned train tunnel near Pontsarn viaduct.
The following year, we were married under the viaduct. Our wedding was the first to be performed there. The fact that it was also an international wedding made it enough of an event that the local newspaper ran a story about us.
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Christine and I kissed the day after we were engaged. I had not kissed a girl before, not properly. I had, of course, kissed my mother goodnight. I had kissed a girl on the cheek because she and her friend said I was too holy to do such a thing. I once snuck up behind a friend of mine, a guy, during a prayer meeting. I was going to kiss him on the cheek as a joke. He turned as I leaned in and I nailed him on the lips. That kiss still makes me laugh. In the very very very heterosexual world of my youth I broke a massive taboo during a prayer meeting and eight years before Britney and Madonna did it at the VMAs. I had also been kissed by a couple Russian girls. Russians are not afraid of kissing.
My original plan was to save kissing until our wedding day, but I made that plan when I was younger, stupider, not in love and under the influence of Bill. (We did manage to hold off on the sex, just.)
We took a walk in the woods above Christine’s village. It was late summer. A misty rain was falling. We stopped for one of our frequent hugging breaks. And then there were lips and tongues and feelings that had never existed in me before, which I won’t describe because TMI.
We still do a lot of kissing.
Christine and I watched Dead Pony’s TRNSMT set on Friday. We both thought they were adorable – pure young rock-n-roll energy.
Grow slowly
Jeff