My First Boyfriend....

My first boyfriend's name in the 3rd and 4th grade was Lucky Beach. I'm not making that up.

I shared him with my best friend at that time, a girl named Joy. It actually worked out pretty nicely. We took turns sitting next to him on the high bar on the playground. We didn't swing from it or do chin-ups or anything it was designed for. We just sat there. Whoever's turn it wasn't to sit up there with him had to stand on the ground and hold his jacket. Eventually we decided it was childish to share a boyfriend and made him choose one of us.

Bad move.

Joy was pretty. And skinny.

I remember going to an away basketball game with him and his..... parents? Somebody. That part is fuzzy. When we were that age, going to an "away" basketball game.....or anything else....was a big deal. I'm surprised my mother let me go, because if you went somewhere with someone's parents, it was expected that your parents would reciprocate at some point. And Mama didn't believe in hauling anybody's kids anywhere. Including her own.

She rarely let me spend the night with friends, because that meant we were expected to let them come spend the night with me at some point in the future, usually the next Friday night. She needn't have worried.....most of the time the friends didn't want to come back again. Mama didn't believe in putting on her "company" manners just because we had company.

Back to Lucky Beach. I'm sure he had a "real" name, but I've forgotten what it was. He moved away at some point, although somewhere around 7th grade a friend and I ran into him when the fair was in town. That was the first time in my life I rode something that went upside down. I guess I didn't want him to think I was a wimp. I don't know where he wound up.

I did a Google search for him a while back.

You know what you get when you do a search for Lucky Beach?

You get every resort in the free world, some of them clothing-optional.

If anyone out there runs into Lucky Beach, tell him I said hello.