I still sign my letters “Peace and Love”. I learned that from you. We are best with this pen and paper intercourse: you are eloquent and I am quiet. You dance the male anti-war whoopee while Vietnam helicopters thicken the background of your voice against Janis Joplin, “Take another piece of my heart,” and the rusty delivery of Van Morrison’s Doors into your horror while all around us, America is going crazy. 

  The air is thick with cigarette smoke the first moment I see you at the Red Herring Coffeehouse, University of Illinois’ college basement café crowded with wooden tables and chairs while a folksinger strums his guitar to protest songs. I am 17, my senior year in high school, visiting a friend.  She and I used to sing together in the choir at St. Stephens for four years as kids, and then attended the same high school.  You walk through the double doors, pass the long-haired hippie boys and the more hip girls, and stroll to our table.  You kiss my girlfriend then walk through the smoke to buy her some herbal tea. 

   You return, whisper into her ear and look at me. Your short, muscular body is encased in a black leather jacket and black Levis, but it is the elegance of your pure, white, silk scarf, the wonder of your blond hair and the adventure of your motorcycle helmet that entrances me. Our eyes meet. I blush and lower my head. You kiss my friend then leave. 

   “Who was that!?” I ask her. 

   She laughs, brushes you off carelessly, like a flea or tick because that is what you are to her. 

   “Shawn. He’s in love with me, but I just want to be friends,” she says. 

   We double-date that night, your 19th birthday.  I am with your roommate, you with my friend.You look so funny together when we walk to the Stadium.  My friend is so tall, you cannot reach your arm to her shoulder, although you try. You let it fall to her waist. She told me earlier that you two scramble down the ladders into the forbidden steam tunnels to play guitars and sing. 

   Jefferson Airplane sings “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”. Marihuana wafts through the rich chords, Gracie Slick’s ringing voice and the psychedelic light show flashes rainbow streams about the packed Stadium. Afterwards, we troupe to the Red Herring.  I take my friend aside, confess how much I like you. “Take him off my hands, please!” she begs. 

   I sit on your shy roommate’s lap as I flirt with you. Our jokes and talk encircle the four of us into a haze that transforms the basement coffeehouse into a Paris café. Even your roommate opens to the night.  When we leave, we are no longer two couples, but four friends, braced against the December chill. 

   You borrow your roommate’s car the next day to drive me to my grandfather’s house in St. Joseph’s, just nine miles away.  We park before the small, green wooden house as I explain he is in his eighties, a long-retired carpenter, and that he only had one child, my father.  At the door, I repeatedly introduce myself to him, but the old man shakes his head. You say, “Hello,” and he instantly hears your scratchy voice. 

   You two talk football and Illinois’ upcoming basketball game. I sit with you on the couch and try to catch my grandfather’s ear.  He bends his mane of white hair towards me, but sadly shakes his head, his blue eyes large with cataracts.  He hears your voice, accented by your birthplace on Ponape, a remote island in the South Pacific for your father is a Navy career man and you learned to speak Ponapean before English.  

   My grandfather cannot hear me so I walk about the small home and leave you two men to talk.  I discard the open tin cans from the kitchen counter, scour the porcelain and floor of the bathroom, sweep the floors in the small bedrooms where my sisters and I played with Father’s lead soldiers and horses and an old, miniature cannon on wheels.  I inspect the remains of the old chicken coop out back and then enter the earthen cellar. I find Grandfather’s carpenter tools and Grandmother’s dusty canning jars.  

   Our first solo date that night is the basketball game in the Stadium.  The place is brilliantly lit. The players run around so fast with the ball. You explain, but since I tried to play in high school, I know what’s going on.  You give me a short, freezing ride on your Honda 350 back to my friend’s dorm room, and then a rushed, last minute ride Sunday to the Illinois Central train station. You carry my cardboard suitcase, follow me to the train. I am late and turn from the coach’s steps and reach for my suitcase. As you hand it to me, suddenly your lips are upon mine and we are kissing. 
  
    “Of course I’ve been kissed before,” I write you in response to your letter which arrives on Wednesday. 
“I wanted to kiss you all weekend, but I had a cold and didn’t want to spread the germs,” you write back. 

   For my 18th birthday in February, I escape my parents’ house and take the Illinois Central to Champaign. I wear your motorcycle helmet and keep my winter coat buttoned so you can sneak me into your dormitory room. Your roommate snores as you tell me you want to make love with me.  We undress, but I keep my underclothes on:  I’m afraid of getting pregnant.  You say you will marry me if I do, and all those daily letters from you for two months convince me, but your roommate’s snoring is intermittent and his bed is on the opposite side of the partition, in the same room. He may wake and hear everything. I fear pregnancy and push you away.  

   You wire me a two-foot high bouquet of flowers for Valentine’s Day.  My six sisters are as surprised as I am. They tell me I should photograph it, dry the flowers between book pages and save them. I think they’re crazy.  They say it is a once in a lifetime present and I should appreciate it. I laugh because I know this is only the beginning.  I call you, thank you and, for the first time, I say to a man, “I love you.” 
   
   You say the same. Your love is more ardent in your next letter, your  ideas splashed onto the paper with such power that I am awed that you find me worthy of their reception.   

   You say “Yes” to my senior prom in April.  I phone for your measurements for the tuxedo, rent it, arrange our double date, buy my own corsage and plan the dinner afterwards. 

   You are late.  And later.  I have re-arranged my hair, spilled brown shop polish on my yellow gown and contacted our ride – one of my cousins –  three times. You finally call.  

   You tell me you are hitch-hiking from Champaign to save money because your motorcycle couldn’t make the 150 mile trip, then you got lost on Chicago’s South Side and you just missed the last train to Des Plaines. 

   My Chicago cousin, a blind date for a friend, picks you up at the station and rushes you to my house, into my bedroom.  You hold the cummerbund in the air, wonder what is, where it belongs.  I fasten it around your waist, affix the cufflinks and brush the lint from the jacket.  

   The ballroom at the Flying Carpet Hotel is too bright and too small.  Worse, a group of nuns in their black and white robes sit at the entrance.  The music is middle-aged with a saxophone and muted electric guitars, but I am with you in public, your arm around me. An ex-boyfriend leaves his date in line for photographs to apologize for another one of his stupidities. I introduce you. I tell him I don’t want to talk now, and then it is our turn to be photographed.  

   You smile, your ears protrude from your head so much, even your longish hair cannot hide them. You look happy and I feel normal around all the nuns and girls from high school, who whisper and wonder who you are.   

   Many have never seen me with a boy. They only know the girl who did well in Latin, read Scientific America during a boring English class – and got caught by the nun and thrown out of class – am friend with the nuns, work the switchboard every day after school or on weekends, and have family problems.  Plus, I’m a bookworm.  

   With you at the senior prom, all those years of loneliness evaporate and I forgive you for not taking me to your military ball in Waukegan the previous month. I feel as light as my golden yellow dress and so relaxed with you, that we pretend we are drunk to explain our giggles and silliness. 

   You sleep over at my house, in one of the empty bedrooms upstairs. I am in the bedroom across from it. I am tempted to crawl into your bed and stay, but we only kiss before I leave. 

  You go home to Waukegan and return with your parents’ 1957 white Chevrolet. We drive to the forest preserve to find Jeannette, my only good friend from high school.  Her boyfriend has bought a kite for us to fly next to theirs. He is leaving Chicago to ride a bicycle cross-country to San Francisco.  But you drive in circles at the forest preserve, unable to find the right rendezvous point.  You park the car and kiss me, then convince me to move to the larger backseat.