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What Can a Child Really Know of Death and Lost Love?
It was only as an adult that I could grieve for a childhood loss
Young love stories
My friends and I were sharing memories about “young love,” a nostalgic collection of stories that ran the gamut of emotions. A colleague told of Thelma, his first sweetheart, and the terror his brother created when he said that if you go with a girl to the theater, you HAD to put your arm around her.
My friend worried because Thelma loomed heads above him. How do you put your arm around a girl when she’s a half foot taller than you? “You sit on the edge of the movie seat the whole time without ever lowering it!” he laughed.
My office mate told of her first love, the classic “dork,” eyes covered with thick coke-bottle glasses. He was quiet and polite, but his hair was always greasy. He was now serving time for armed robbery.
I shared a story about Kent Shaw, not my first love, but a fellow-third grader. He had brownish hair and glasses, and in an unprecedented fit of wildness, I agreed to sit with him on the bus home.
In a matching, spontaneous, uncalculated move, he decided to cover us from the tip of our heads to our laps, with his raincoat. We sat the whole ride home under cover of a…
