World’s worst kisser

It took seven years, but last week The Wife finally told me something I didn’t think I’d ever hear. No, she didn’t tell me to get out. It was something far worse.

We were getting ready for bed; I framed her face with my hands and kissed her lightly on the lips. She smiled up at me and said, “Honey, I have to tell you something. Kissing is like licking an ice cream cone. You’re supposed to do it slowly, so you can enjoy it.”

They say the first step towards recovery is to admit you have a problem, so here goes. I’m a bad kisser – I’ve been a bad kisser all my life. If they gave a trophy for bad kisses, our house would be full of them. Matter of fact, I suspect I come from a long line of bad kissers, considering the advice my dad gave me as a boy.

At the start of the fifth grade I decided it was time to kiss Candi. When I went to Dad for help, he told me to suck on a lemon. Why a lemon? He said, “You got to get the pucker right. It’s the most important part of a kiss. Without a good pucker, you have nothing.”

Candi had been my girlfriend for two years — everyone one knew that – except, of course, Candi. I figured it was about time to tell her. And because I didn’t really know how, I thought a kiss would do all the talking. Boy, was I wrong!

The kiss I planted on Candi that day had my best pucker power behind it. I sucked an entire lemon during lunch just to get ready. Right after lunch, we went out for recess. Candi had just gotten on the swing when I walked up behind her and kissed her. Her reaction was not what I expected.

To say that Candi didn’t like my kiss would be an understatement. First, she jumped off the swing and started spitting. Not very ladylike, I might add. Then she screamed, “Eewww, he kissed me!” stuck out her tongue and wiped it with the back of her hand. Probably had something to do with too much drool – just one bad side effect of sucking lemons, I guess.

With my classmates’ laughter bouncing across the playground, Old Mrs. Crabtree pulled me to the office by my ear. I drooled all the way to Principal Baker’s door and through detention for a week. But I never gave up on kissing.

Such an experience would have stunted another person’s emotional growth, but not mine. I kept right on sucking lemons all the way through the fifth and sixth grades. I sucked lemons all the way through five years at Briarwood High School, home of the Mighty Buccaneers.

If you asked anyone I kissed during my high school years, they would probably all tell you the same thing — I either over-puckered or over-drooled, or both. If kissing is getting to first base, I’ve never gotten out of the dugout.

In 1976, I graduated from Briarwood, packed my clothes, a crate of lemons, and headed off to Auburn University. With over 20,000 students – more than half of them girls – I had to get better at kissing. Things would certainly be different. But they weren’t. I just over-puckered and drooled on a larger scale.

Every now and then a girl would take pity on me and try to teach me the correct way to kiss. One told me, “Relax your lips.” Now exactly how am I supposed to do that? It’s not like my lips have biceps.

Another told me, “Just think of something sour.” I told her I didn’t have to think of something sour – I have a lemon.

A girl majoring in physiology told me, “Let our lips become one, and they will sent us to another place.” We never made it to that other place she talked about. Probably a good thing; I doubt they’d have lemons there anyway.

I did met a country girl at a fraternity party my junior year who helped me to get rid of all that drooling. She switched out my lemon for a persimmon. Persimmons gave me greater pucker power with no drool. With a drool-less pucker, you’d think I would have the kissing thing licked. Nope, then I had to contend with what to do with my tongue.

Being as it was the holiday weekend, I asked The Wife last night if we were going out for dinner. I had just bought new lemons at the grocery store, and I figured we give the kissing thing another try when we got back.

“No,” she said as she walked over and dumped the two perfectly good lemons in the trash. Then she smiled coyly and pulled out the freezer drawer. “I have something else in mind.”

I looked over her shoulder and immediately understood. The entire freezer was full of Nutty Buddy ice cream cones.