Member-only story
Summer Love
First Summer Of Kisses
Ledbetter Memories
It’s the summer before 8th grade. I’m working on my basketball game to destroy the hearts and minds of every middle school baller in the county. I almost never thought about girls, well with the exception of Miss America’s beautiful naked body: Vanessa Williams.
Can you believe it? I saw a picture of her while at The Gardner Webb Basketball Camp in a girlie magazine. In the early 1980s, she was the only girl I wanted a nut from.
But I digress.
I’m jogging back from the ball field, speed dribbling past Miss Mary’s house. Although she had a fence, a huge German Shepherd lived there. He was unpredictable.
Sometimes he would just watch you walk by, other times he would run up to the fence. Then he did something that would make me always run or dribble full speed past Miss Mary’s.
He jumped the fence going after a neighborhood kid, to his defense, the snotty-nosed brat was taunting him. He didn’t bite the knucklehead but he scared the bejesus out of him. I was taking no chances.
As I slow down once past the beast. I get to the stop sign that intersects Academy and New Hampshire Street and I see what at first blush I thought was a beautiful mirage.
