September Nineteen
Creative Nonfiction
This is a bonus audio post in celebration of a day that is special to me, for so many reasons. First and foremost, it’s my firstborn child’s birthday. Happy birthday, Tim! This post is about a person I once loved whose birthday was September 19th as well. Be sure to scroll through as you listen and all the way to the end of this post—lots of pictures!
When I was in junior high, I fell in love with the fifteen-year-old boy who mowed our lawn. The boy who mowed our lawn did not fall for me. Mark liked A, a girl in my class—a tall, willowy brunette who had already developed a young woman’s gently sloping figure. My body was still angular and boyish. I didn’t stand a chance. While A was on her way to becoming Audrey Hepburn, I channeled Pippi Longstocking: skinny, red-haired, freckled. Decidedly unathletic, socially inept.
Boys have never been easy for me. If you read My First Boy/Girl Party, you’ll know that, the year before I fell in love with Mark, my mom had sort of forced me into adolescence. There was no turning back as far as she was concerned. For my twelfth birthday that summer, she threw a surprise boy/girl party and organized party games like the games we’d played at K’s party. But the only boys who came to my party were the neighborhood boys we played tag and Midnight Monsters and superheroes with in the communal backyard. Seven Minutes in Heaven with them was awkward at best.
That fall, at my first junior high dance, a boy named J asked me to dance to “Nights in White Satin.” After the dance, while I was waiting for my mom to roll up to the curb in our butterscotch Chevy Malibu station wagon, he wooed me with sweet talk about Zeus—we were studying Greek mythology in Miss Lippman’s seventh grade English class. I looked up at the starry night sky, and when I looked down, he kissed me, closed mouth, of his own volition, my first real kiss. The reluctant peck Chris Miller had bestowed upon me during Spin the Bottle the year before no longer counted.
J and I started “going out,” which in the seventies meant we were a couple and held hands, but we never actually went anywhere. He came to visit me the following Saturday—he rode his bicycle the ten miles from town to Navy housing. After he met my mother, he made a crack about her weight, and that was the end of our brief romance. I’d come out of the womb a feminist and was an early opponent of men commenting on women’s bodies or physical appearances. I broke up with J immediately and never looked back. We’d lasted one week and half a Saturday.
Kissing Chris Miller in sixth grade was awkward and humiliating, and kissing J in seventh grade was ultimately disappointing, but I hadn’t given up on the idea that kissing a boy could be something special, if it were the right boy. When I was just shy of thirteen, I set my cap on Mark.
Over a period of months, Mark and I became friends. He was shy, so it was up to me to make it happen, and although I was shy, too, this was something I wanted enough to go outside my comfort zone. My mom helped me out—she liked Mark, was thrilled I was showing an interest in boys, and encouraged the romance. She made glasses of iced lemonade I could take out to Mark while he was mowing our lawn. Once when I was coming out of the house with his lemonade, I overheard Mark’s surfer friend D, who lived across the street from me, wonder aloud why in the hell I was following Mark around: “She’s going to be cute when she grows up. But she’s just a kid.”
Eventually, Mark and I started talking and learned we had friends in common. Well, A, the girl in my class that he liked. A was mysterious and unattainable, a junior high version of Natasha, the woman who stole Big’s heart from Carrie on Sex and the City. A’s family kept to themselves—they didn’t let A out of the house, except when she babysat for a neighbor around the corner. That’s the only time any of us saw her outside of school. We spoke to her through her neighbor’s bathroom window in short snatches when she could sneak away from her babysitting duties. The rumors were that boys saw her other times, too. She snuck boys into the babysitting house—they sat on a fire hydrant at the corner and waited for her signal. And sometimes she snuck out of her own house late at night to meet them.
Fortunately for me, A didn’t like Mark back. At least, not in any kind of lasting way. At first, our friendship consisted of Mark pining over A and me being a good listener, but we gradually found other things to talk about. We spent all our free time together, sometimes in his garage with the door up—he’d converted it into a place to hang out and work on motorcycles. Sometimes at the beach, where he took me for rides on the back of his motorcycle and taught me how to ride and to surf. And sometimes at my house, where we laid flat on our backs in the grass, looking up at the sky and talking. Or closing our eyes and not talking. And during one of those closed-eyes-not-talking moments, I realized Mark would never make the first move, and so I made it. I leaned up on my elbow and kissed him, just a quick brush against his soft lips. And then he sat up and kissed me back, and I knew that he liked me, too. Closed mouth. Sweet and innocent. That was the beginning.
Over the next year or so, Mark and I became the teeny bopper version of that couple. The already-too-serious couple our friends thought would grow up and get married. The too-much, too-soon couple our parents worried would get me knocked up before I graduated high school—in truth, by the time we had sex for the first time, I was nineteen. I can still picture Mark on my front stoop when he got off work at the 24-Hour Coffee Shop, sitting on his purple ten-speed bike, wearing blue jeans and the crisp white button-up shirt he was required to wear for work. Tan skin. Wavy, sun-kissed brown hair, white teeth featured in the most sincere smile that reached all the way up and into his green eyes—when people talk about eyes that “crinkle” and “sparkle,” 1970s Mark invented those. I can still hear his throaty laugh.
After my friend Barbara’s family moved to Chula Vista, our mutual friend Terrie and I hung out together in Mark’s garage. We watched Mark work on his motorcycle while we listened to the radio—“Come and Get Your Love,” “Kodachrome,” “Squeeze Box,” “Seasons in the Sun”; listening to that music, we believed we knew all there was to know about love and life and sex and grief. We went on group dates at the Village Theatre, the walk-in movie house in Coronado—the first was Live and Let Die—and Mark held my hand. I brought my friend Barbara, who was visiting from Chula Vista, and Mark brought his friend Randy. For my thirteenth birthday, Mark gave me a silver charm bracelet with a charm engraved with my name on one side and “With Love, Mark” on the other. I still have it. We went out for hamburgers and to the drive-in, and he gave me a promise ring. We talked about getting married someday as if it were a given we would. We thought we’d be together forever.
Mark and I did spend our lives together, but not in the way we’d imagined. My family moved away from San Diego just before I started high school. After we moved, life got more complicated. My dad was sent overseas, again, and my mom was unhappy. I was unhappy too and angry about all the things I couldn’t control. I locked myself in my bedroom. I lashed out. A’s family had been transferred to the same Navy housing a few months before us. I stole her boyfriend H out of anger and spite. I helped to break her heart, a heart I now suspect was already quite broken.
Not long after we moved away, my parents divorced. Not long after we moved away, I was assaulted at a party. In another Navy coincidence, my fifth-grade best friend Milli’s family had been transferred to the same Navy housing, too—she no longer lived next door, but she lived in the next cul-de-sac. She was at the party and tried to help me. She’s still haunted by the fact she couldn’t.
I was a different person after that. More angry. Closed off. I didn’t feel loveable, and I didn’t trust anyone who thought I was. I started drinking and picking bad boyfriends.
Mark and I stayed in touch. I alternately clung to Mark and pushed him away. I pushed him away when he asked me to marry him when I was fifteen—he promised me he would make all the bad stuff go away and give me a good life. I pushed him away when he asked me to marry him again when I was nineteen. By then, I was the single mom of a little boy with big brown eyes and a stuffed, green felt Kermit the Frog he kept losing and I kept replacing—I just bought him a new one for his birthday. :) In another coincidence, my son was born on Mark’s birthday, September 19th. I pushed Mark away when he asked me to marry him for the last time, when we were adults and found ourselves both briefly single again. It took me a long time to deal with my shit. Years. Decades. Still doing it. But Mark remained my friend through it all.
When we were in our fifties, Mark fulfilled his lifelong dream of moving into the desert outside of San Diego. Six months before I planned to visit Mark for the first time in many years, he went into the hospital for a surgery and never woke up. The day after he died, my friend Barbara got in touch with me to deliver the news. I am grateful I heard it from her.
Today is my son’s birthday, and it would have been Mark’s. But today is something else too.
Mark’s childhood best friend Randy and my childhood best friend Barbara are celebrating their 44th wedding anniversary today—September 19th. Randy and Barbara have a beautiful family—two handsome sons who have given them the sweetest grandchildren. Randy and Barbara are still madly in love. For Randy’s sixtieth birthday a few years ago, Barbara rented out the Village Theatre and screened Live and Let Die for family and friends. Randy choked up telling the people gathered there about their first date. That is something Mark and I never saw coming. It wasn’t part of the plan. It was a serendipity. Something joyful and lasting that came out of our love and the friendship that started when we were just kids.
“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
—L.M. Montgomery
NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
It’s not too late! Join me at the Central Coast Writers’ Conference September 26th & 27th in sunny San Luis Obispo, California!
“We do not remember days; we remember moments.”
—Cesare Pavese
SOME THINGS FOR READERS
All Writing Is About Death
(“Death in Fiction” by Scott Cheshire, recommended by Halimah Marcus)
The Solo Traveler’s Guide to Making Friends
(Maggie Downs for Be Back By Dinner)
How Would Jane Austen Define an ‘Accomplished Woman’ Today?
(Grace Aldridge for Literary Hub)
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
—Haruki Murakami
SOME THINGS FOR WRITERS
Keep Showing Up, Keep Listening, Keep Looking: Ann Patchett on Writing and Life
(Hillary Moses Mohaupt for The Brevity Blog)
Banned & Challenged Books Data
(Compiled by the American Library Association)
Why You Need a Press Release in a Digital Age
(Claire McKinney for Jane Friedman)
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
—Lois Lowry
SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU SMILE
“Maybe you don’t need the whole world to love you.
You know? Maybe you just need one person.”
—Kermit the Frog
Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
leannephillips.com
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I enjoy your writing so much. I can't wait to read your novel.