By the Light of the Moon

I was never a country fan, although most of my friends in high school were, so I would listen to some of it sometimes, even attended a couple of concerts. For the most part and to this day, though, I'll still proclaim that I'll listen to just about anything but country and rap (save for the Beastie Boys - I'll always listen to the Beasties).

Though I dated and even had some fairly long relationships with a few different boys in high school, the one I always refer to as my "high school sweetheart" is who I fell for in the spring of 1983, when he was an about to be graduating senior and I was a junior. We wound up together after having both gone solo with friends to that year's junior-senior prom, started dating, and eventually almost got married later in college (but didn't, thank goodness).

There was this rental house way out in the county that was owned by the older brother of one of the guys in our group of friends, and the house was unoccupied at the time, so it became "the party shack" for our gang for a while that spring. The older brother had left a minimal amount of furniture in the house, which made it even nicer for us. Though we would have surely hung out there without furniture too, it served our purposes well for small weekend parties, and even had a working refrigerator too - all the better for beer storage, ya know.

I fell in love with my high school sweetheart in that house, one night after we had been dating for a few weeks, hanging out in the kitchen talking while the party was going on in the adjoining room. I was sitting on top of the stove (people walking in to get beer out of the fridge kept threatening to turn on the stove and cook me, heh). Prince Charming stood in front of me, rubbing my arm the whole time we talked, talking about probably nothing important at all - just chitchat, you know. I was already pretty smitten with him as it was, but after that night I was completely and hopelessly in teenage love, as it were. Yeah, it was the rubbing my arm thing that did it. I was such a sucker for stuff like that.

Some weeks later, after we were already a pretty well-established couple - it was a small town so everyone knew who was with everyone else at any given time - there was another weekend gathering with tunes and beer down at the current "party shack". The brother that owned the house, or the brother we were friends with, had brought a cheap stereo down there and hooked it up, so now we had music besides the cheap portable radios people had previously been bringing down there. At some point in the evening - as will often happen at such gatherings - my boyfriend and I slipped off to an adjoining room for a little make out session, innocent though it was (I swear it was!).

I don't know how many hours we were in there away from everyone, and the truth was we both almost fell asleep, which could have been disastrous - for him anyway, I didn't have a curfew but he did - and it was pretty late when we both realized we weren't really hearing any party noise anymore from the next room, just music.

We walked out into the living room and sure enough, all the lights were turned off and we were alone in the house. The front door was standing wide open, and the only light was from the moon shining into the house from over the trees, way out there in the countryside in the middle of basically nowhere.

Just about then, "Dixieland Delight" came on the radio. Even though we both needed to leave and get home, my sweetheart asked me to dance, so we did... slow dancing there in the dark until the song was over, no light but the moon shining down on us. Seventeen, and ridiculously happy in that way that's only possible when you're a teenager really in love for the very first time.