A Lesson to Young Men, on How to Enjoy a Young Woman's Company.

This is a true story.

This story is not what you might think it's about.

Twenty-odd years ago, I was 17 years old and a senior in high school. I lived in a town in the Western U.S., somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. I had the luck to be involved in many school activities that took me to other towns in the region from time to time.

For those who have never lived here, it is hard to understand what vast distances there are between communities. I had my driver's licence by the time I was 15, and to drive 120 miles in the course of a Friday-night date was perfectly normal. And that was just to date a girl who went to my own school!

And while the distances were large, the towns were small. My high school had less than 150 students. Let's do the math: Half those students were female. I might be interested in dating one out of ten. Of the girls I was interested in, at most half might be willing to date me. Of those, at least half might be dating someone else. That leaves less than 2 girls for me to date in my own school. And the next nearest town was 20 miles away, so it's not like I would just run into girls from other schools while hanging out at the mall. No mall, no cross-town schools, few girls, few dates.

So, that's the bad thing about living in a small Western town as a teenager. The good thing about it was, being in a small school, I was able to participate in every possible activity. Sports, theater, music, you name it, I did it. We didn't have cliques like you might have in larger schools. If the jocks didn't hang out with the music geeks, there wouldn't be enough people for a basketball team *or* for a band. With every school activity came opportunities to travel, and I took every opportunity I could get.

Being on the road I got to meet new people, which was great. An even better thing about being on the road is I could be someone else for a while. I don't mean I could pretend to be someone I wasn't. I mean I could be who I really was and not who everyone in my town thought I was.

So, I found out that when I met girls on the road, they didn't have any preconceived notions about me, nor did I about them. Early in high school, at a track meet, I heard a girl nearby shout, "hey, foxy!" I looked at her, and she was smiling in my direction. I turned around to see who she was looking at, and there was no one there. It took me several second to realize she was talking to me. So I stopped to talk to her, and I realized she was sincere. She really thought I was good-looking, a novel experience for me, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed, and she also seemed to enjoy simply talking to me. Wow, I thought, could meeting new girls really be this easy?

I quickly learned that it was. If you approach a girl politely, and treat her as if she is attractive and fun to be with, she will be, and she'll be happy you came by. (She will be doubly happy about it if she is used to being treated as unattractive and unpopular).

Did this lead to more dates for me than I could get at home? You bet it did.

So, back to my story. I enjoyed every road trip, but my favorite trips of all were related to our school's foreign exchange program. Our school hosted a few foreign exchange students each year, and my family hosted one of them in our home. The exchange program encouraged lots of contact not only between the students and their host communities, but also between all the region's exchange students and their friends in the different communities they lived in. So with the exchange program I got to travel to other towns and spend time with kids not only from around my region, but from around the world.

One of the girls I met was from a town over 100 miles away. Let's call her Amber. We met when I was sixteen, and met again and again in our various activities. I got to stay with her family a couple of times, and once she invited me to come and stay for the weekend over spring break - no special occasion, just a ski trip shared with a friend. A few of my home town friends came along too and crashed at other houses, so it was really just a big weekend party that split up at night and rejoined on the ski slopes each day.

Oh, did we have fun. We were a couple of goofballs up on the ski hill. We would drop our poles halfway up the ski lift, and ski back down to them practicing our form when we weren't pushing each other into snow banks. We would talk and flirt on the lift, and then once she kissed me. I was very ready for this, and I kissed her back.

Now, at that time Amber had a home town boyfriend who wasn't around that weekend, and I had a home town girlfriend as well. (By applying some of those lessons in treating a girl as if she is fun to be with, I had actually managed to convince one of my home town crushes that I was fun to be with and not just that nerdy kid she had known all her life - so the odds at home weren't nearly as bad as I painted them before.)

Amber teased me after that, constantly reminding me she had a boyfriend then looking at me in a way that boldly invited another kiss. Finally I said, "Let's just be together. We can just enjoy each other's company for the weekend and not think about last week or next week. Let's just be together, now." And she looked thoughtfully at me, and smiled, and leaned in to kiss me again, just a simple, cozy kiss without flirtation or seduction, and said, "yes." And the rest of the weekend was even more special than it had already been.

On the last night, I went to bed by myself in the guest bedroom. I stayed up reading for a while, and to my shock Amber came in to join me. Her parent's bedroom was just down the hall, and I was astonished she would come to my room like that. She was wearing pajamas, and ooking directly at me, she started to take them off. First came her pants, and her slender, muscular legs were gorgeous. Then she pulled off her top, and I saw her naked breasts, small and smooth, firm and happy, the first I had ever seen in full light. My eyes were riveted to her. She was beautiful, and never before had a girl shared her beauty so simply and honestly with me. Looking back at me, Amber smiled, a smile so lovely I will never forget it.

Wearing nothing but her panties, she crawled into bed with me. I shall only say that we thoroughly enjoyed what we did, although we did not do as much as my seventeen-year-old self wanted to.

Now, all you young men, what do you think my one regret was for that entire weekend? No, I do not regret that our adventures that night did not take us further. I simply regret that I did not ask her to stay there longer beside the bed, where I could just look, and enjoy, and have her smile that beautiful, wonderful, radiant smile at me.

When she came to my bed thoughts of her beauty became distant, and thoughts of, well, other things took over (we were both teenagers after all). The long moment of "now" that had begun on the chair lift was over, and worries of tomorrow and yesterday came rushing back in. Oh, we did have fun, and much later she smiled at me again as she left the bed and went back to her room. But it wasn't the same smile, and I rarely saw that smile again, even though our paths crossed many times.

So, the lesson here is not how to pick up girls on the road. The lesson is: Learn to be in the moment. You get what you expect, and if you approach a girl simply expecting to enjoy her company, you will, and she will probably enjoy yours. And when a pretty young girl shares her beauty with you, enjoy that moment for all that it is.

-Joseph

P.S. to Amber, wherever she is: As short as it was, that moment with you by the bed will always be with me. Thank you.