I Dated at Age 13 and Lived to Tell the Tale!!!

           

A daytime talk show this morning featured a popular TV actor who is all in a tizzy over the fact that his 15-year-old daughter has begun [gasp!] dating! A discussion ensued about how parents should prepare for this -- what to tell their kids "beyond abstinence, beyond the anatomical details," as one of the hosts put it.

Often nowadays I hear earnest conversations about whether 16 is too young to date.

Sixteen!

Despite my advanced age, I am anything but a "woman of the world." On a classic Facebook meme, I score very low on "Have you ever" type quizzes. My life has been beyond vanilla. It's more like fat-free, sugar-free, imitation vanilla. And yet...

I had my first date at age 13. And here I am, unscathed. Here's the complete sordid story!

My closest friend at the time was Pam, and she was best known for being "boy-crazy." We haven't spoken in 15 years or so, but last I heard, she still was boy-crazy. But that's for her to disclose. I mention her because she was the instrument of my moral downfall, if that's what dating at 13 signifies.

It was a lovely fall Saturday in 1972. Pam had spent the previous evening at the local roller-skating rink, where she met a couple of guys. Brothers. Steve and Bert. She immediately hit it off with Bert, wanted to see him the next day, but what to do with his brother? Steve was unattached. Pam and Bert arranged to meet at a local department store, and to have Steve meet me.

Well.

My dad was the sort of person that our talk-show friend could well relate to. He had once told me that if I ever went on a date, he would expect to be invited along as a chaperone. He told me this when I was about seven, and even then, the idea sounded kind of yucky. Now, at 13, it was the stuff of nightmares. So some degree of sneaking was definitely called for. I did tell my mother -- she basically thought all of my father's ideas were yucky, regardless of the context, so she had no trouble with Pam and me meeting a couple of guys at a store in the middle of a Saturday. She wished us luck and off we went.

I might mention here that I grew up in a suburb -- a "planned community," with lots of sidewalks. Everything was accessible at that time. The most dangerous part was crossing Hempstead Turnpike, which was kind of a "strip," with stores on both sides. As long as we paid attention to the lights and cars, and ran very fast, we could make those crossings. The store was probably less than a mile from my house. The walk was no big deal, and we got there within 20 minutes or so.

This comes up because many suburbs are now deliberately designed to be traversed only by car. They have no sidewalks, and stores are not within walking distance. I guess this is why parents nowadays seem to be so invested in their kids' social lives. The kids don't have a social life unless somebody's mom or dad can drive them to it.

So that's one reason why dating at 13 really wasn't any kind of an issue.

This "first date" involved us meeting the guys, and then slowly walking back across Hempstead Turnpike and along the streets of Levittown to Pam's house. We sat in her back yard and put up with her younger sister Abbie.

The walk home was about the only thing I remember, and the thing I remember was being almost completely silent. This was not an awkward silence -- it was more than filled by Steve. Steve and his brother had some sort of connection to the 1950s nostalgia pop group Sha Na Na.

If there are any avid Sha Na Na fans reading this, oh boy, did you miss a treasure trove of trivia! Steve talked NON-STOP about the group. I remember virtually none of it, other than the name "Sha Na Na" being repeated about every 20 seconds during a 30-minute walk (we walked slowly and went the long way...). This means, if you're keeping up with the math, that I got to hear that at least 90 times. Wow.

I didn't know the group and had basically nothing to contribute. If he'd asked me anything I could answer, maybe it would have been more of a 2-way conversation. But it was a Steve monologue. Yes, I know. He was probably nervous too. Bless his heart, okay?

I walked along saying "Uh-huh." He probably heard more "uh-huh"s from me than I heard "Sha Na Na"s from him...so there's that.

Finally, we got to Pam's house. Her sister was only 7 and she was a pain, and my typical habit was to tell her to buzz off. At one point, she asked a question, I gave her a sarcastic answer, and Steve yelled out "Hey! She DOES know how to talk!" indicating silent me. With that, I lapsed directly back into my non-verbal state, and probably the only thing I said to anyone after that was "Goodbye" when we parted company an hour or so later.

That was my date. Don't remember when the next one was. Also don't think my father ever found out about it. One of my fears during the walk from the store to Pam's house with the guys was that my father might drive by while running errands, pull over and say something horribly embarrassing. Knowing my dad, it could have been anything from "Oh, who is this, your SWAIN?" to "Get in the car, you're grounded for life!" Maybe in hindsight such an event could have spared me the unfascinating details of Steve's Sha Na Na connection.

But then, I'd have ended up with one less blog topic.

So there's that.