Leave it to Beaver fantasy household we were not, that’s what our mothers would have done.
Accept the ride offered to us when we were teenagers hitchhiking in the early 1970s, even though we had a funny feeling about the oily-haired driver with a trash-bag stuffed with, he bragged,
more pot than you ladies could dream of.
Take the kiss when we were in our early twenties from the pale, pock-faced soldier sitting next to us on a plane, on his way to be deployed to Grenada, after he had asked if he could, and we said no even as our mental viewfinder flashed: Marlene Dietrich kissing the shirtless soldier through the window of a train, a soldier kissing Miss World on a Bob Hope tour, and the V-J Day Times Square photograph of the returning sailor kissing the nurse. Unaware that the woman would reveal later: the sailor, a stranger, had grabbed her, and