Because even though I’m 53 and he’s a smidge older, and we’ve both been around plenty of blocks, I still want to thrill him - and myself - by doing new things together. So I announced my intention, promised I wouldn’t break the skin, and he very kindly let me bite his armpit. Because I want to be the only one who has ever done that to him. It’s SPECIAL.
When I’m forced to be social, I so often repeat the same stories, because I know that they’ll get the same laughs. With him I don’t want to don the self-deprecating comic persona I use as my shield.
I love telling him things that I have never told anyone before. I love searching for words rather than reading from the script. I love the way he watches me when I’m purposefully putting my words together, building the story just for him.
It was one of those times when I confessed to him an odd secret bad phase from my youth. When I was little enough that I needed to pull a chair over to climb up and reach it, my Mom kept a pewter bowl filled with plastic grapes on the big wooden hutch in the dining room. (Which also held - at various times - cartons of cigarettes, the fancy silverware, the book Martha made for our Dad about Sam’s 17th birthday, which Dad missed because he was in the hospital, having had his penultimate heart attack, the many, many pig gifts that Mom didn’t care to display, and filler paper, among other oddments.)
I don’t know why I first plucked one. Maybe I went to palpate the bunch and one rolled off? Further, I really don’t know why I put it in my mouth. It tasted like dust. My teeth bounced on it, just like me on the trampoline. If I got the little stem-hole just right on my tongue, it made this really appealing pop/suck/smack like what you imagine octopus arms would sound like pulling away from a hug. Obviously, no matter how it happened that first time, I didn’t stop with one.
Those dusty little smackers were addictive. I had to sneak to get them, no mean feat in a house where it was nearly impossible to be alone. I didn’t swallow them. (Probably) But I did eventually denude so many that it got noticed. There was hollering, but I never ever fessed up. Never told a soul until I revealed it to my fella a few months ago. Trying to thrill him by baring my soul, you know. Then I forgot about it.
Until this weekend when he handed me a box and told me to open it.
I am 53 and I get luckier every damn day. I cannot wait to teach him how to make the octopus hug sound with his tongue.
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