Hayride With A Nice Girl

Somehow I found myself on a hayride. At the tender age of seventeen, my opportunities for "good, clean fun" had been somewhat limited. I could blame it on my Lutheran upbringing, I suppose, but that hadn't prevented me from having "bad, dirty fun." This was to be different. A nice girl (weren't they all nice?) had somehow invited me to a hayride; I think it my have been her mother's doing- the girl had barely spoken to me before- perhaps her parents had known mine from PTA. What was different about this date was that I knew that she was on the pill- still a bit shocking for a high school student in 1967. We had been on the school newspaper staff which held regular classroom hours. The teacher usually left, so the students just goofed around a lot. Kenny, the zen joker, thought it would be amusing to pretend that the nice girl's purse was a bomb, and that he was a demolitions expert, employed to defuse it. He had taken a eyelash curler from the top of the purse and was using it to carefully remove the rest of its contents, one piece at a time. When he got near the bottom he pulled out a card of birth-control pills. The nice girl was embarrassed, but not as embarrassed as Kenny.

So when I found myself sitting next to her curvy girlishness on a hay wagon one cold November evening, my mind and heart were racing. The tables had been turned on me- I was the pursued, and she was the more experienced (or so I thought).
Evidently my animal magnetism was lacking (to say nothing of my social skills) and the date fizzled out into nothing. Soon after that incident I managed to get kicked off the newspaper staff (due to my underground newspaper) and we never spoke again.

But she was a very nice girl.