THANK YOU, IAN

By Joan L. Cannon

Now that I'm an old woman, I wonder if there may be some food for thought — mine or others' — in recalling those times that loomed so large when I was young, and in fact still do.

For instance, should I tell my granddaughters about what their first loves ought to be like? Somehow warn them how much they could lose if they were less lucky than I was? If it weren't for my first love, I wonder to this day how my last love would have worked out.  

I’ll call him Ian. He seemed so much more a man than perhaps he actually was, especially in comparison to me: naïve, ambitious but undirected, an intellectual and emotional pollywog. Ian did more to make me a happy person than probably almost anyone else in my life until the man for whom he unwittingly readied me came along. 

First love. I lucked into mine. Are there boys like that out there today? I thought for a while that my daughter might be as lucky as I was, but there's no way I could tell, though I did try to find out without invading her space.

All these decades later, it seems I still owe that young man something for what he gave me. 

We met in a confirmation class at church. He was mannerly and good-looking in an undistinguished way, except for his height. He was near six feet to my five-foot two. Three years my senior, he seemed clearly perched on the brink of manhood. I looked up to him in every way. And then he asked me out.

I hadn't known he lived on our block. I hadn't met his foreign-born parents. He spoke with no discernable accent, so I was surprised to learn that he'd been born in Scotland. The fact that his father was the manager of the apartment buildings where we lived must have been enough to let him pass muster under my father's demanding eye. 

Typically for that pre-World War II time, we began with a movie at a theater within walking distance, followed by a sundae at a tiny mom-and-pop soda fountain and newspaper store under the Third Avenue El.  I wonder if a couple of young people, especially if they live in a small town or rural area, can find equally safe and inexpensive entertainment nowadays. That was the year I was thirteen. 

The week of my sixteenth birthday, Ian took me home from a party we'd gone to — both dressed up and feeling very festive — in a taxi with a moon roof. I remember looking through that roof at the cold brilliance of an almost-full moon against a black velvet sky. As the cab pulled up to my door, Ian released the hand he'd been holding, and turned to me with a serious look on his face and said, "You shouldn't turn sixteen without having been kissed.” 

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