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I Remember Sandy
 Today
I’ll be discussing what is
called “sex,” drawing on my own personal experience, so I hope
the reader will put up with some frank language. Chiefly I’ve learned
that a woman doesn’t have to be “sexy.” She just has to
be female.
 It
started back in
Michigan with my first girlfriend, Sandy, when I was about 14. No, not
“about” 14. Fourteen exactly. It’s not as if I can’t
remember. How could I ever forget?
Sandy was
not your homecoming queen type. Far from glamorous, she was a shy, some
would say mousy girl, but very sweet, with a soft voice you could hardly hear.
Her ears protruded somewhat, but I thought they were cute. I was probably
the first boy who had ever walked her home from school. If she didn’t
have much to spend on clothes, I never noticed or gave a darn. Maybe she
wasn’t a knockout, but she was a lot more feminine than most of the
girls who were. I couldn’t have been happier if she’d been
Audrey Hepburn. In fact she was better. I didn’t have to worry that
Sandy might ditch me for some rich, suave Cary Grant.
She was a
pretty typical girl of the time, the Fifties, who I guess had played with dolls
and dreamed of getting married and having babies some day, just as I had
dreamed of making Little League and, eventually, the New York Yankees. She
was about as far from being a vamp as I was from being a wolf. We were
both skinny kids. Somehow we wound up holding hands. Necking? Petting? Are
you kidding? If you wanted that stuff, you waited until you grew up and went
to the painted women of the big cities out East.
It was the age
of Elvis, but I didn’t dance, so we mostly stayed home and listened to
Pat Boone’s version of “Tutti-Frutti,” or maybe Nat
“King” Cole singing “Walkin’ My Baby Back
Home.” A couple of real Fifties swingers, Sandy and I. That was before
baby was pronounced “bye-buh.” Not that I’d
ever call Sandy “baby”; I let Pat and Nat say it for me. I think
she knew what I meant.
Sandy’s family was so poor that she could only afford one
falsie; not that she told me this in so many words, but she had a bratty little
brother it was hard to keep secrets from. Falsies were what the Fifties had
instead of implants. I tried to assure her that her goiter was barely
noticeable. She tried to cover it up with makeup, if Clearasil counts as
makeup. (Tip to guys: Later in life I found the line “Goiter? What
goiter?” useful with the fair sex. It puts them at ease immediately.
Elementary savoir-faire.)
Sandy and I
never got around to discussing marriage. Or even going steady. I
wasn’t ready to settle down. Besides, I was already settled down,
essentially. I was born settled down. And our chief ambition wasn’t to
set the world on fire. It was just to be normal. That was hard enough when
that brother of hers kept taunting, “Sandy’s got a boyfriend!
Sandy’s got a boyfriend!” (Tip to the girls: If you wish to project
the image of an exotic woman of mystery, lose the kid brother.)
![[Breaker quote for I Remember Sandy: Real women don't need glamour.]](2007breakers/070323.gif) Sure,
I knew the facts of life (by
then I was well into puberty), but you didn’t mention them around nice
girls. Remember nice girls? They had to learn the facts of life by marrying
guys who already knew them, I figured. We didn’t talk about
“family values.” You just behaved yourself — or else.
One fact of
life your parents never told you about was what was then called impotence
(when people mentioned it at all), now known as ED. Not that I’d have
believed it anyway. In fact if my elders had told me about it I’d never
have believed another doggoned word they said. The very idea would have
seemed inherently improbable. And a teenage boy could use a little ED now
and then. The least of our problems. We prayed for it. And now they want to
“cure” it?
In her
unassuming way, Sandy taught me all I really needed to know about women.
Even later, when I (inadvertently) encountered those painted women out
East, I found I couldn’t go too far wrong as long as I remembered that
each of them had once been a Sandy.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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