The Parade of Lights was always the highlight of my year as a kid. My parents would start getting my brother and I ready an hour before we left, handing us several layers of clothing; long underwear, two pairs of thick woolen socks, jeans, sweater, ski jacket, scarf, and padded ski gloves. It was never enough. But I didn’t mind.
One year in particular –I couldn’t have been more than five- the families of my three best preschool friends accompanied us to the parade. It became a tradition later with one of the families as the other two moved on. My best friends were all boys, a fact that probably should have foreshadowed my future choices of friends, but we didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. Mitchell, my favorite, had a bright blonde bowl cut, Vincent had short black locks, and Matthew sported a light brown buzzed look. We sat together on the piles of thick Afghans with our younger siblings, freezing in the Colorado winter and watching the colorful floats draped with Christmas lights glide by. There were also bright red fire trucks blaring their fire signals and heavily bundled volunteers with buckets full of candy. I watched my breath hang in the air as I dived for a Tootsie Roll, clipping someone accidentally with my flailing elbows.
When the parents finally couldn’t stand it any longer, they dragged our tiny stiff bodies back to the cars and drove to a classy dinner at the nearby Pizza Hut.
The four older children, my friends and I, commandeered a small table of our own near the “big person†table, where the littler kids got stuck. We chattered excitedly about the floats and our candy hauls as we stripped off the heaviest of our layers, and ordered soup for dinner. It was that cold.
When the meals arrived, they were too hot for us to sip at first, so we blew against the steam to cool them.
“Don’t spit on it!†I chided the boys, who were blowing on their own soups with a little too much enthusiasm.
This remark hit them as hysterically funny, so they giggled and continued to spit in a dramatic fashion. Vincent spoke up after studying Mitchell and me for several minutes.
“You know what you two should do?â€
“What?†I asked curiously, slurping my soup and giggling.
“Kiss!â€
“Kiss?”
“On the lips!â€
I can’t even begin to imagine my thought process at that point but it was probably something along the lines of this; Vincent told me to do something… do it!
And so we did. Leaning in with our eyes squeezed shut and our lips exaggeratingly puckered, I planted one on my bowl cut friend. It lasted one second, tops
“EW!†It was a simultaneous voicing of disgust that all four if us uttered at the same time. Vincent thought it was hilarious.
“Why did you make us do that?†I demanded naively. He just laughed.
