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Your first love feels the warmest, and your first hreatbreak feels the coldest. The sweet, untainted love of young children knows no fear, no deceit, no pain, until that first heartbreak.

When we were very young, Donny led me on adventures in the back yard of our little orange stucco house in Culver City, which he transformed sometimes into Tarzan's jungle and sometimes into the wild west, through his imagination and my willingness to believe in him. We had sword fights with imaginary villains, gun fights with Black Bart, and elephant hunts in the bamboo patch.

Mom used to baby-sit Donny, his little brother Dickie and their baby sister, while their mother worked to make ends meet.

We spent nearly every day together for the whole summer of the year when we turned five. We planned to get married when we grew up, buy a little house and have children of our own.

We got into big trouble the day we tossed all the teddy bears over the fence and watched with delight as the neighbor's boxer dog tore them to shreds. Mom made us go next door and pick up every shred of stuffing from the lawn and the bushes.

On happier days, we caught horned toads among the ivy and played with them. We never hurt those little lizards, and we always let them go after stroking their bumpy backs a few times while trying to avoid their bite. We watched the shiny black pollywogs in the fish pond grow legs, turn green and walk away, still sporting fat tails that would eventually wither away on the back ends of the little thumb-sized toads.

Late one night, I heard voices in the living room. When I went to check it out, Mom ordered me back to bed. I soon learned that my first heartbreak was unfolding that night as I slept.

In a sense, Donny was about to grow legs and walk away. He did not leave me willingly, but he broke my heart when he went away.

I remember lying in bed before I fell back to sleep, listening to the familiar hum of the old Singer sewing machine and wondering what was happening on the other side of the wall.

Nobody knew very much about spousal abuse back in 1959, but Donny's mother did know that she had to get away from her husband. She simply could not stand the beatings any more. Terrified that he would find her and kill her, she packed up her children and drove away in the middle of the night. She had stopped at our house to beg for help. She had no clothes for her children, who were dressed in pajamas, and no money to buy anything for them to wear.

Mom did not have more than five dollars to give her, so she fired up the sewing machine and whipped out a few Jiffy patterns for them. Then they drove away into the night, and I never saw them again.

I doubt that Donny's father ever knew, or cared, that he had torn apart not only his own family, but also the future family that Donny and I never had the chance to create.

Donny, if you are out there, Leslie still loves you, after almost 50 years.

~~~

Learn more about this author, Tessa Dick.
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