One day when my friend was over at my house he wanted to go to one of
my cute neighbor's house. She was a year older than us and quite cute
but I was too shy to just go over and talk to her as a girl even
though I had been friends with her brother and had been in their
house at least a hundred times. I don't know why going over to see
her was so cripplingly nerve wracking but it was. For some reason
when we walked over their we did it without our shoes on and it was a
quite war spring day and our feet were getting burned on the
pavement. We went up and knocked on the door all higgelty-piggelty
like it was no big deal at all and then she came to the door and he
talked to her. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal but it most
definitely was I was vapor locked and barely able to breathe with the
anxiety of the situation. She invited us in to meat her friend from
gymnastics who was spending the night over and was also cute. Oh,
great now there are two girls and two boys, like couples. I
suggested we should go outside after we had talked for a bit and my
friend had started dome playful tickle touching with my neighbor. We
went out and I remembered that I didn't have shoes and was trying to
figure out a way to get somewhere less intimate than a parent empty
house when my friend suggested that the girls give us piggy back
rides up to the park. They did. They carried my friend and I the two
and a half blocks up the road to the park where we were less
susceptible to foot burns. When we were done at the park they
piggybacked us to another friends house where we hung out for a
little bit and then we were piggy backed home. It was a most bizarre
day. I am not by nature very comfortable with people serving me and
getting a piggyback is way to much of a imposition in my opinion but
the girls were willing and my friend was enthusiastic about it. I still felt guilty for making a girl I didn't know carry me for a mile on
her back. As I write this I am embarrassed about asking a girl I
didn't know to carry me on her back because I was too stupid to bring
shoes. If I saw me doing that I would insult myself and tell myself
to get some damn shoes and some damn dignity, damn it. I was not
really thinking anything more would come of it at the time but on
Sunday at church my neighbor told me that my piggyback slave had
really liked me and wanted me to call her. I did call her a couple of
times and we talked a bit but she lived in a town 9 miles away and to
a car-less youth it might as well have been Bangladesh. I never saw
her or was portaged by her again.
