I am sitting on the back deck of my home in Fayetteville, drinking my second cup of coffee and watching bicyclists in their phony Lance Armstrong togs whizz by on their $10,000 titanium bikes. I loved to bicycle when I was younger, but now I’m 77 and have a Jabba the Hutt prostate gland that doesn’t take kindly to bicycle seats. It doesn’t much like coffee either, but a man’s got to have a few pleasures left. My new motto is: As long as somebody somewhere is posting cat videos, I have a reason to live another day.
Writing one’s memoirs necessarily puts one in a contemplative frame of mind. Why do all of us feel that our memories possess such importance? My earliest memory is sitting on the floor with a bowl of Grape Nuts and watching “The Andy Griffith Show” on a black and white TV while Ma and Pap sat on the couch behind me and laughed. I thought I was another Opie. Life has never really gotten better than that. Ma always put sugar on the Grape Nuts.
Though my tête-à-tête with Jade Stone on that moss covered shelf above Onyx Creek is not my earliest memory, it’s a damned important one. In fact, this month is the sixtieth anniversary of my “becoming a man,” which is actually a decent euphemism for a boy losing his virginity. Nothing makes a fellow feel more masculine, more ontologically “real,” than the first girl who says, “Yes,” to him.* He wants to thump his chest like King Kong and roar over the sound of the waterfall. If the girl is also a virgin, well, that’s as good as it will ever get—like sugar on Grape Nuts. Neither you nor she will ever be a virgin again, which means that the experience is absolutely unrepeatable regardless of how many times you have sex in an effort to recapture the feeling.
Another problem with having multiple partners is that sex loses whatever meaning it may have possessed before you had sex. The effort to recapture the significance of losing your virginity—which resulted in your “becoming a man” or “becoming a woman”—now makes you feel the opposite: you end up feeling less of a person not more. You become a means and never an end. If you try to increase your sense of self by doubling down on sex, you become a black hole of desire, an abyss, in Latin a vanus which is the root of our word “vanity.” The law of diminishing returns diminishes us until desire itself disappears, and we’re acting out of habit or someone else’s fantasy or just plain boredom.
In short, sex becomes a cycle of disappointment and regret. This is not a moral statement, just a truth.
Sixty years.
Strange to think that so brief an encounter should live so long in memory, but maybe not. We can spend hours reading a book that we promptly forget when we close the covers but regret forever a decision made in the heat of a moment.
“Jade Stone” is a hard name for such a soft girl. How supple we were in one another’s arms!
Afterwards, we dressed, brushed the moss and twigs from our clothes and hair, and started the trek down the hill toward her house. Behind us someone blew a whistle by the pool, and the laughter grew fainter the further we walked. I found my backpack and guitar behind the outcropping where I had stowed them, kissed Jade one more time, and wrapped her in my arms. She felt small and vulnerable, and I wondered at what we had done. Then she stepped away and said, “Let me come with you. Please.” Tears were in her eyes, and her lip quivered. “I can’t go back . . . there.”
And more than anything in the world, I wanted her to come with me. Me and Jade walking down the road with Onny trotting along beside us. We would hold hands and sing “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “500 miles” and stop at farmhouses for handouts. Every night we would sleep together like two puppies in a blanket, and every morning, we would pack our gear and keep walking and walking until—
Where? I didn’t know.
Jade was waiting for me to say something.
I said, “Of course, I want you to come with me, but how far do you think we’ll get before your father finds us? And then he’ll kill me or accuse me of kidnapping you or who knows what he’ll do?”
“We don’t have to walk along the road. We could go through the woods.”
“But how will we know where we’re going?”
“Where are you going?”
Good point, I thought. Just because you’re on the road doesn’t mean you know where you’re going.
I said, “Jade, I don’t think we can get away with it. And I think I’d end up in jail.”
She looked down and said, “I guess you’re right. But promise me one thing.”
“Sure. What?”
“Promise you’ll come back for me.”
“I promise. You’ll always live in here,” and I touched my chest. It was a cheesy thing to say, but nevertheless true though I should have touched my head instead.
We hugged one more time, and I started walking through the woods in what I hoped was the direction of the highway.
And I did see her again.
Five years later, I was preaching (yes, you heard that correctly) a revival in Huntsville, and after the service, I drove to a night spot in Alabam for a drink. I ordered a whiskey neat and looked around for any opportunities that might be drinking alone when I saw her sitting at a table with a fellow in a felt cowboy hat and a plaid shirt with pearl buttons. It’s always tricky to approach a girl you’ve made love to when she’s with someone else, but I figured I could finesse it. So, I walked over and said to her, “Excuse me; I’m sorry to interrupt, but you look familiar to me. Have we met?”
There was a flicker of recognition, but she hid it and said, “I don’t think so. Any idea where?”
“That’s what I’m trying to remember. My name’s Otis. Bulfinch.”
“Otis? Sorry, I never knew anyone by that name. You must be confusing me with somebody else.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. My mistake. Sorry to interrupt y’all’s evening.”
The fellow rubbed his jaw and said nothing, but Jade said, “That’s okay. Mistakes happen.”
And that was that.
*The Hebrew word for “jade” is yashepheh, which was translated as “jasper” in the King James Version of the Bible.
*I assume that women also associate losing their virginity with “becoming a woman,” though I don’t know that for sure. Maybe women feel that way when they have their first period. Or get married. Or have a baby.