What: First date, first kiss.                                                                                                          When: School year 1950; seventh grade; 5 years out from the end of WWII.                    How: She asked me to go with her to her best friend’s birthday party. She asked me. She asked…

The time following the war’s end for me was somewhat idyllic and tranquil, helped to be so mainly because the principal and all the teachers did their best to protect the 5 of us Japanese kids from any residual hostility from the war in what was essentially a white school. There were negroes and Mexicans among my classmates, but mainly it was a white community.

I was a young 13-year old, a very young 13, and had no experiences with dating. Being very young, I was also quite innocent and naïve about the ways of girls. I had friends, both boys and girls, and fit in fairly well I thought as one of the guys, but very soon my life was going to change in a big way.

My memories of my first date and first kiss are very sketchy. I don’t remember much of anything that happened, and have only sense memories of the birthday party where it all occurred. I was thrown the day Virginia asked if I would go with her to the party. I understood this to be a date, and felt embarrassed, blushing I’m sure, and very nervous. I said yes. I don’t have any recall of who was there, either boys or girls, or what we did during the party. I have some vague sense that we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Spin the Bottle, and Post Office, but don’t know what else if anything we did. I have an image in my mind that for Spin the Bottle we sat in a tight circle on the floor, and the spinner and spinnee leaned into the middle of the circle and kissed in front of everyone. For Post Office, the birthday girl was the postmaster, and it was she who said someone had a letter and from whom, and the two left the living room, down the hall to the hall closet, ducked in, closed the door, kissed, and then returned to the group. I have the feeling Virginia arranged with her friend that we would receive a good number of letters. I wish I had memories of what actually happened that day.

When Dad came to pick me up, Virginia thanked me for going to the party with her. Many years later, the thought occurred to me why she had me meet her at the party instead of picking her up at home. She may not have explained to her parents who she was going to the party with, and me being Japanese may have been an issue she didn’t want to deal with her parents around. It could be that was why. Perhaps.

Virginia’s dad was in the Air Force and stationed at Castle Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command base a couple of miles north of town. Within several days after the party he was transferred to an air base in Germany, and he and the family left shortly, and I never saw Virginia again.

A year later I received in the mail an 8^th grade graduation photo of a beautiful young girl who wrote in red pencil on the back, “Lots of luck and Merry Xmas, Love Virginia.”