Reminisces of kisses...

My friend Hap Hazard challenged KVMR listeners to come up with some reminisces of kisses for his full-moon Friday Espresso Magazine radio show. So I came up with a few, and could have come up with quite a few more since the really good kisses, you never forget. And the best part was having Ellen come downstairs in the office when he was reading the one about her and me in Santa Cruz and the kiss I got when she realized that couple he was talking on the radio about that sounded so familiar was actually us. So here's what I sent to Hap:

Okay, Hap, here’s a few first efforts at this very compelling theme…

A few of first kisses occurred to me off the top of my head: first, Joanie, that endlessly alluring friend of my (one year) younger sister who for some unknown reason liked this slightly older geek brother of her best friend and took some time out from her project of sleeping (utterly unbeknownst to me) with absolutely every other unattached boy in Watsonville High School to show this young man a thing or two about kissing and yes! I did have a thing or few to learn and, with Joanie's assistance, learn them I did.

And I remember at a party with Leah in high school in the sixties. We were both too green to roll joints yet, so we both just massaged out the tobacco from Marlboro cigarettes and somehow packed the flaccid cylinders back with pretty potent (for the time) pot. And smoked it to our mutual satisfaction and then made out to stroboscopic lights and Cream and Hendrix for the rest of the evening. And I didn’t think I needed any more sex than that ever, that seemed more than enough mystery in those endless kisses to keep me venturing forth for a lifetime.

And, finally, that first week or two with my future wife, when (God I hope my children don’t read this and recognize me right off) the sex was great but the kissing, my God, the kissing was fantastic, I could stand on Pacific Street there in Santa Cruz and our kissing would become an opera in which I was fully self-expressed and she was as well and there was nothing we couldn’t say from the utter depths of our hearts that wasn’t purely heard and perfectly understood from the utter depths of the other. And I remember some incredible, never-to-be repeated show at the Catalyst that we both missed, deliriously, happily, because we were both too busy kissing. And, praise God, thirty-five years later, we still are.

Thanks for asking, Hap.

Brian