An Innocent Kiss, A Simple Pain-Reliever--This Is The Stuff Of '90s-Style Controversy? By Jeff Smith WHEN I WAS a 4-year-old kid in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, Marylee Preble and her brother Gary and I studied medicine in my backyard. My backyard was better-suited to the study of the healing arts than was the Preble's because the grass was taller. The summer before I turned five and moved from Maine back to Tucson, my mother caught me and Marylee out in the tall grass beneath the apple tree, and got the pictures to prove it. I was wearing this shiny, satin-looking bathing suit and Marylee was in a ruffled sun-dress. Brother Gary is distinguishable in the photos only by his Coke-bottle glasses. One of the snapshots catches Marylee and me just sitting in the grass trying to act like there's nothing going on, but there's this grown-up arm and hand poking into the picture from the right, with the index finger making the universal scolding sign, that says otherwise. In the next shot, however, I am caught kissing Marylee on the cheek, while she obviously giggles. This tells me that my mom, and Dot Preble, Mom's buddy and Marylee and Gary's mom, thought the whole episode was pretty rich. Two years later I had all but forgotten who Marylee Preble was. Blame it on Venera Cosenza and Flame Vallentine. Boy, they didn't make names like those back in the State of Maine. Flame and Venera were in Miss Page's first grade class at University Heights Elementary School in Tucson. The girls used to chase us boys around the playground, and when they caught us they'd kiss us. Flame caught me, maybe the first or second day of school, and I haven't been the same since. Of course if one superimposes this bit of history over the template of contemporary political correctness, all of us kids--now semi-centenarians--come off as sexual harassers, molesters and obsessive/compulsive perverts. Two little boys of six or thereabouts have become global celebrities, and the objects of stern school discipline, for casual kisses that we of the University Heights first grade of '52 would have considered nothing more than a cursory greeting. So you've probably been wondering what about Venera Cosenza? When I say she was quite a package as a school girl I mean that she was attractive as a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, one of the smartest girls in the class and physically fit as a sea otter. The thing about Venera, though, was the way she matured. She was my girlfriend, I am honored to say, when we were in the third grade, and it was toward the end of that year that I began noticing changes in her. This time it was not the absence of anatomy I had first noted in Marylee Preble, but an even more stunning presence of features hitherto unremarked in members of my generation. The terrain that was the little Miss Cosenza was taking on topography that was terra incognita to me, so I asked another girl in our class what was up. This girl knew way more than anybody else in the school, on account of her father was dead and her mother was a nurse and the two of them were real close so her mom talked to her a lot, like she was mature or something. So of course nothing she said made any sense to me or anybody else I related it to. We all figured she was nuts. Years later I finally understood that Venera got the jump on puberty by about five years over the other girls, but while I was eight or nine years old I remained ignorant but blissful, the envy of every other boy in school. Now the point of this episode is that as an 8-year-old third-grader, my friend Venera might conceivably (unintended) have had cramps or headaches or something that could have necessitated a glass of water and a Midol. Given the maturity and close maternal bonds of my classmate and confidant in the matter of the onset of menses, it is similarly probable she would have been in possession of said over-the-counter aspirin substitute, and would have shared with Venera, had the need and request arisen. And thus would both my innocent friends have been tarred--by today's paranoid standards of drug-abuse and trafficking--as addict and pusher. Low-lifes and criminals. Clearly the leaders and the laws that make a sexual harasser of a 6-year-old boy who plants an innocent kiss on the cheek of a 6-year-old girl; or status offenders of girls who share Midol to soften the sting of menstrual cramps, have wandered so far from common sense and truth that they wouldn't know the old neighborhood if they saw it once again.

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