When he said, "You only have one first love," I knew exactly what he meant. In fact, it was my first love who made the statement when we had lunch last week to celebrate his 60th birthday.
     We met in Sister Helen Marie’s first grade class. Our paths hadn’t crossed in kindergarten because he attended the morning session. I’d been an afternoon student. He lived two blocks from school and was a walker. I rode the big yellow bus.
     Sister assigned our desks according to height. Being short, I was in front. He was tall and sat towards the back. We were both in the A reading group and he always chose the seat next to mine. One morning, he slid his arm across the back of my chair and kept it there. "I can hear those wedding bells now," Sister said, looking over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses. I blushed.
     He and his buddies rode their bikes to my house and we played tag, kick the can, or hide-and-go-seek. When my girlfriends came over, they often dared me to call him on the telephone. Nice girls weren’t supposed to phone boys, but we did it anyway. If a mother answered, we always hung up. Once, my Mom invited him to dinner. She set the table with the company plates and made chow mien—a dish he wasn’t fond of, I found out years later. He’d eaten it to please my mother.
     Between fifth and sixth grades, his family moved to a suburb too far away for him to ride his bike to my house. At his new school, I knew he’d find another girl to sit close to in class. The next year, my family moved to the opposite side of the city. I found a new sweetheart. But I never forgot my first love.
     The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, a friend talked me into taking Latin II in summer school. A boy in the class knew my first love. I told him to say hello for me. Not long after that, our doorbell rang. "Someone’s here to see you," my mother hollered down to the rec room. He was standing inside the back door with a big grin on his face. He’d ridden all the way to my house on a motor scooter.
     We eloped when we were college freshmen. Too young to know what marriage entailed, but we longed to be together. Ours was an on and off type of union. We loved each other but weren’t grown up enough to handle everything that went along with it. After 20 years, we found ourselves on opposite sides of the city once again.
     We barely spoke during the next 20 years. When I called to say happy 60th and invite him to lunch, I was pleased, but surprised, he said yes. It was a true reunion. We gabbed about old school friends, our sisters and brothers. Our children and grandchildren, too. We talked about the people who love us now, whom we love in return. But as he said, you only have one first love.
     And mine could always make me laugh. He could make me cry, too, and that’s what he did last week. The sweet type of tearing at the eyes when you realize the mean feelings you had for each other have passed and you can move forward as friends. Not the pal you’d double date with at the drive-in, but the friend who shares the same grandchildren.
     As we left the restaurant, he put his arm across my shoulder and said good-bye. I looked up at him and saw a glimmer of my first grade classmate. My very first love.