Over time I see God's Wisdom in all this but at the time it was mostly only very confusing for me at 15 or 16 years of age to deal with at all. I remember going to a church beach party when I was 15 growing up in the Los Angeles area. We likely were at Santa Monica Beach. I had just turned 15 so God had come into my body. I had just had my front teeth capped too by our dentist because I had had my front teeth broken in half when I hit a car on my bike at about age 9 years of age. One of the teeth was within 1 /100th of an inch from having to be pulled. But, the dentist was able to paint some plastic over the broken part so he didn't have to pull one of my two big top front teeth at age 9 then. So, when I had had my teeth capped and I was at this beach party the women there from my church thought I had very beautiful legs and I felt pretty strange about this and didn't want to be a male model for women I knew in my church. This was the first time I realized that women found me beautiful and I didn't like it. It was too strange for me at 15. So, mostly I went body surfing or boogie boarding with the canvas type of boogie board before they actually had boogie boards like today. I stayed in the water and I didn't want to be a male bathing beauty for women to gawk at because I was 15 and didn't know how to deal with this at that age.
However, in 1963 something very bad happened in the world, President Kennedy was assassinated and I remember the teacher and the girls crying in my English class when we found out about this. This teacher was very beautiful and all the boys had a thing for her. Her name was Mrs. Barr I think then. Behind me sat a girl from Alaska with naturally blonde hair and blue eyes named Gayle. Thinking back now how I thought then is kind of ridiculous now. But then, it made logical sense to a 15 year old boy who didn't want to die. My thought was that I didn't want to die a virgin because if the president could die it meant I could easily die too and I didn't want to die a virgin. I can laugh about these thoughts now but then they were very serious to me. So, the pretty blonde I asked out on a date to a movie theater, The Alex Theater in Glendale which is still there. This would have been 1963 in the fall just after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
So, this was my first date then. I went out with her several times including ice skating at a skating rink. However, at 15 I wasn't very mature and didn't even know how to properly kiss a girl at that age. So, the "Block kiss" was very disappointing to me then.
However, at age 16 I passed the written driving test with a 100 on the written test and also passed the driving test as well. Since I was working with my father's business part time then I could afford to buy my own 1956 Ford Station wagon for 800 dollars then. In 1964 I was 16 years old and I bought it one month after my birthday when I got my driver's license. So, I had my own car with money to buy gas with so I could drive up to 400 miles every weekend that I wasn't working with my friends partly because gas was less than 20 cents a gallon then and I was making about $3.50 and hour when the minimum wage was only about a dollar an hour then. Then I started going out with a girl from my church when I was 16 who was 21 years of age and beautiful who was much more experienced than I was about dating. So, at 16 I learned from her how to "French Kiss" at a drive-in movie. This changed my life a lot when I was 16.
From this point on I became very good with the girls and women in my life. The bad part of this is in some ways I grew up too fast. The good part of this was that I was now confident of being around women in general. This didn't mean that I understood women completely because no man actually does. I just became better at it than 90% of any young man I knew. And this changed my life a lot from then on.
Then I was engaged to be married and this was broken off when I was 21 and partly why I left my childhood church I was born into.
But, then I became more suicidal than before because of breaking off with my church and breaking up with the girl I had planned to marry. At the time I was 21 and in love likely with more than one person. However, I didn't believe this was possible because I thought too much like a Disney movie where there is only ONE person for each person on earth. But, later I found out this is not true. There might be literally hundreds of people suited for each person in the end. But, I had to grow up a lot from 21 to 25 to actually get to this place in reality.
So, the main way I stayed alive from 21 to 25 was dating girls. The way this worked for me was that if I was dating someone and she loved me then I couldn't kill myself in order to honor her love for me while I was dating her. So, I stayed alive by living to honor the one who loved me right then. I succeeded in this way until I met my first wife at age 25 and then we had a son after we married when I was 26. After this suicide was a thing of the past because now I had to stay alive to raise my son right from then on.
By God's Grace
The Alex Theater in Glendale, California was my first date in 1963 when I was 15 and going to Glendale High School.
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