"pussies, and dicks, and people fuckin' and all..."

when i was in the fourth grade, i had a friend named mary nell.  she just tracked me down and friended me on facebook, and i am blown away in that way that we all are when small worlds' orbits intersect in that bizarre universe.  anyway, i have a funny story involving mary nell that i like to tell from time to time.

one weekend mary nell spent the night at my house, and we probably did usual kid stuff.  the next day, we hung out with my friend and neighbor, whitney, and one of things whitney and i liked to do was snoop through her older brother tim's room and check out his porno mags.  he would have been in seventh grade. whitney and tim and i talked about sex-related stuff in a kid way-- like jokes involving dicks and periods and pubic hair.  innocent and more interested in being gross than anything actually sexy.  but i guess i was fairly savvy about sex for a fourth grader-- i don't really know, and at the time i assumed my store of forbidden knowledge was similar to that of my peers.  and i think mary nell probably had been exposed to much less information about sex than we had at that point.

anyway, whitney and i showed tim's magazines (hustler, beaver, and oui, if memory serves) to mary nell, and sort of pointed out and explained the various parts and activities on display, to the point that we understood them.  she didn't seem surprised or confused or anything more than curious in the same way we were.  so then we finished that and did other kid stuff like playing in the creek behind our houses and riding bikes.

later in the afternoon, the three of us piled into the family van when it was time for my dad to take mary nell home.  as we were pulling out of the driveway, my dad asked us if we'd being having fun and what we'd done that day.  mary nell piped right up and said, "oh, we had lots of fun.  we went over to whitney's and looked at magazines and they had had pictures of pussies, and dicks, and people fuckin' and all."

whitney and i looked at each other, absolutely mortified.  we had assumed mary nell knew what we were doing was something that parents would not think was cool, and could lead to an earnest talking-to or punishment.  my dad responded just as though she'd told him about the crawdads we'd caught in the creek.  i don't think he even said a word-- just a look like, "oh, huh, interesting," and drove on.  and he never said a word about it later, either.