“Come on! Hurry! They stole my football.”

I was eleven years old, on a Saturday afternoon, when I showed up at Megan’s house and she was in an excited frenzy. I had just scaled the drainage ditch between our housing tracts, crossed through her back yard, and found her in the front driveway excitedly hollering at me to follow her.

I made that walk from my house to hers nearly every weekend during Seventh Grade. We spent our days entertaining ourselves in a multitude of ways. One of our favorite things to do was record ourselves lip-syncing and making music videos. We used a VHS camera and compiled all of our performances onto one tape that we titled “Nerds – Volume 1.” We humbly called ourselves “Nerds,” but in reality we thought we were pretty cool.

Sadly… and also thankfully, that tape no longer exists. The list of music videos it contained were performances to songs like “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode, “Rush Rush” by Paula Abdul, “Let’s Give ‘Em Somethin’ to Talk About” by Bonnie Rait, “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, and yes… we even did some line dancing to “Achy Breaky Heart” by Billy Ray Cyrus.

I wish the tape still existed for my own private amusement, but I’m thankful it is gone for the certain vast embarrassment it would cause repeatedly, should anyone else get their hands on it. And of course in this day and age… somebody would… and then it would go viral… and then I would have to move to Antarctica.

Eventually we even made a “Nerds Volume 2” which began to feature other friends and hosted videos to songs from the Wayne’s World Soundtrack, Mariah Carey, Shai, John Lennon, the Bangles, Mary J Blige, the Spindoctors, and Soul Asylum… just to name a few.

When we weren’t making music videos, we were decorating an old unused barn stall to make it into our clubhouse, painting our toenails, baking brownies, microwaving quesadillas, and asking our mom’s to drop us off at the movies.

“Wait.” I yelled running after her down the street.

On occasion as I had been walking up the drainage ditch I had been hollered at by boys who lived in one of the houses that I was walking behind. I had seen them from their house balcony and could barely make out their figures when they yelled at me from inside through a window screen. Not knowing how else to react I either ignored them, or shouted some smart alec remark, and then ignored them. Megan had experienced some of the same taunting when she would cross the drainage ditch to come to my house.

I caught up to Megan just as we turned the corner onto the street next door to her street. Megan’s house didn’t have any direct neighbors. Her home was on a lone piece of land sandwiched between a street above, and the one we were now on, below. The street we had just entered held her closest neighbors and it ran parallel with the drainage ditch we used as our walkway, but held the driveways and front doors of the homes we were usually crossing behind.

“Who has your football I asked?”

Megan was near out of breath and through an extatic expression of excitement and thrill, she said,

“Those boys from the house. The ones that yell at us when we’re crossing the drainage ditch.”

She was beaming.

I could tell from her excitement this wasn’t a bad thing, and that “the game,” was on!

There wasn’t time for any further explanation, we had arrived outside the boy’s home and we could see them looking down at us from inside the window.

I remember being on that street and watching Megan yell up to them as they peered out a window at us. She told them to give us back her football.

I also remember them denying that they had it, and after some playful arguing back and forth and some taunting from both sides, we retreated back to Megan’s house… empty handed.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I saw those boys on their bikes in front of my house” said Megan. “And they were really cute! I was in the yard tossing around my football. I laid it down to run inside for a minute, and a few minutes later when I came back out, it was gone. I know those boys took it, so I ran after them.”

Some time later Megan’s older sister told us that a classmate of hers lived down that street and that she had a younger brother who was about two years older than us. She suggested that it was probably him who stole our football. Megan’s sister pointed him out to us at some school activity and we soon knew his name and his face and went ga-ga over him when we would see him at the theater, in a store, or at a Friday night football game. We never spoke to him, never made eye contact, but we always noticed him and pointed him out to each other and in a twitterpated jr. high way, referred to him as the cute “boy next door.”

And just to be clear… No one actually saw the football stolen from Megan’s house that day. No one actually knows who stole it, or whether or not it really was even stolen at all. And I don’t remember what we did when we got back to Megan’s. I can’t remember if we ate brownies or quesadillas, painted our toenails or made a music video. It’s all a bit fuzzy now. I had no way of knowing back then that I should be paying attention to every detail because my life story was unfolding right before me.

I had no way of knowing then, that nine years later, in the early morning hours of  New Year’s Day in the year 2000, “the boy next door” (who may or may not have stolen Megan’s football) would kiss me for the very first time. And I had no way of knowing that later that year he would make a vow to stand by my side through sickness and health, for better or for worse, until death do us part.

to be continued…