Hitchhiking

I talked a bit with Dad once and he told me a story that I had never heard before.

To set the context, I had always assumed Mom and Dad met in high school, courted through college and married as soon as he graduated, with no other intervening "love interests." But, nooooo, not so. Dad said in a candid revelation that he "kissed a few girls" before he fell head-over-heals for Mom. Apparently, one in particular lived in St. Louis.

Let me first tell you how we got to the subject of his girl kissing history. It was not premeditated in any way. In fact, without the slightest hint about what he was going to say, I innocently asked him to tell me about his longest hitch hiking trip. I fully expected he would recount a ride all the way from Jackson to Oxford (Ole Miss), without a stop. A ride in a luxury sedan with leather seats starting at his front door and ending at his dorm. A ride uninterrupted by the comment, "I'm turning off here."

Instead, he thought a minute (it went on long enough that I had to ask if he was still on the phone). Then, he said, "St. Louis."

I probed for details, asking open ended questions to get him to disclose a part of his youth to which I had never been privy, and slowly, the story unravelled.

The short version is that he had a close girlfriend in Jackson who asked him to double date with her to escort her friend who was visiting from out of town. He agreed and they all went to a dance of some kind. You guessed it, the unnamed beauty was from St. Louis.

I don't know how long the young lady was in Jackson, or how many other times they saw each other, but they became friendly enough to exchange addresses and exchange a flurry of letters back and forth. The correspondence led to an invitation for Dad to spend part of the Christmas holidays in St. Louis with her family. Wow.

I asked him how this happened in light of his undying affection for Mom, and he simply said, "this was before your Mother."

I asked him how his own Mother felt about him taking off for parts unknown for Christmas, and he said "I didn't ask, I just told her where I would be" (he has told me a number of stories that show he was very much independent from his Mother, even though she often tried to fence him in, for example by selling all the cars when he was old enough to drive).

Anyway, the girl's parents made arrangements for Dad to stay with a neighbor, and he spent his first Christmas away from the house down the street from the Jitney Jungle.

I asked him what happened after the trip, and he said "long distance relationships are difficult to maintain, and then, I had a date at Seale Lilly's with Mother."

I'm glad he did.

The funny thing is that after he finished the story, he said, "you know, now that I think about it, I actually rode the bus."