I can remember walking Karen home through a park near our school. I think I even kissed her once. I do know, however, that she was my friend. My girlfriend. My first. That is the thing about young love or affection or whatever it is or was when you were a boy or a girl. It was uncomplicated by the worries of the adult world and seemed more easy and honest.

At least that's how it seemed with my first "real girlfriend," Marcy. I was 15 and so was she, maybe a little Tom-boyish, I guess, in that she was always climbing trees and wanting to go fishing. She sported a natural strawberry blond "afro," was covered in freckles and weighed maybe 75 pounds. I thought she hung the moon. 

The "soaps" were a big part of her. She would get so caught up in these television soap operas that talking about what happened to the characters could make her cry - days later. And she would put her arms around me and tell me that I wasn't like some fictional womanizer on television. She would name him. Maybe something like "You're not like Cliff." And I would say, "No, I'm not. I'm not."

Then she would light a cigarette, a Fatima, or something they don't make anymore. She was always stealing a pack from her father, who smoked them by the carton. They were only two dollars a carton. I hated them, but I joined in once in a while with a few puffs. They did seem "adult." No one guessed just how deadly they were back then. Marcy smoked them only because she had once seen her favorite movie star Katherine Hepburn smoking them. She even tried to talk like Hepburn. It was, of course, a made up accent, part British, part Yankee with a strange wobbling sound, to my ear, almost like a turkey. Naturally, I liked Marylin Monroe, who also affected a voice; a kind of mid-Western baby doll thing.

One summer day, Marcy and I went swimming at a pond deep in the woods. Afterward we were kissing and hugging and all that teenage stuff that passed for love-making back then. I think I even "felt her up," at least that's what we used to call it. But it never got beyond that. We were just too busy, too mouthy, always talking about this one or that one. We were in a kind of love that wouldn't count outside of the protective bubble we lived in back then. Virtually everything could be put off for another time and it wouldn't mean a thing to either of us.

How Marcy and I grew in different directions doesn't  matter, either. In fact, I can't ever remember if there was a "break-up," or what it would have been about. It might have happened because I hitchhiked across the country when I was 17. And I think I did it against her wishes. Anyway, it was irrelevant. We were young, our friends were coming home in body bags from Vietnam, we had tuned in, turned on and dropped out.

I next heard from Marcy ten years later. Her father had passed. I attend the funeral and went back to the house afterward. I sat there drinking some horrible white wine watching Marcy play the hostess. She had stayed in the town. She still sounded the same. The same accent, everything. A neighborhood girl. Me, I had been all around the world, had been to college (several times). I was from there, but I was always just passing through. Don't get me wrong; I didn't believe I was any better than her. Just different.

When the guests were gone and it was just the two of us it didn't take long before the subject of our childhood affair came up in the conversation. We could talk about it without pretense or hiding anything. I told her I thought I was too young even to care about sex back then ("Back then" being just ten years before). And she told me that for her it was more about "romance." And we laughed about her and the soap operas. Then she smiled broadly and told me to wait.

She left the kitchen and I could hear her climbing the stairs. She was back in minute or so. She was holding what looked like a Gerber baby food jar. I could just barely make out its contents. Burned out stubs of cigarettes, lip stick stained. My mind almost went blank. "These aren't . . . "

"Yes they are," she cut me off. "I saved every cigarette we ever smoked together."

"That's romance," she added. I believe we laughed ourselves to tears that afternoon, knowing all the time that as funny as it seemed  our childhood relationship would remain a very important chapter in our lives.

Looking back, I guess Marcy and I had been in the kind of love that makes you save tokens and memories - a love without responsibilities and finances and children or grand children. An unbridled love where oftentimes sex isn't even part of the picture; where simply being together is enough.    

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