Call Her My First Love, Fine By Me

Two girls worth exploring here in terms of Simons emerging manhood:

1. Diane Parker, she of the draws-dropping "field trips" (92).
2. Snug Harbor's Altalondine Jenkins Jenkins (133).

These two harbingers of our narrator's puberty--a puberty he's smart enough to know is coming but not mature enough to prepare properly for--sort of punctuate the B-story of Edisto, if you will, and adds to the coming of age story with its frankness. One's the backwoods girl who'll give you immediate answers, Two's the girl that makes those answers emotionally manifest, both of them pull an important curtain back on the mystery of the opposite sex Simons has become aware of.

Show you mine if you show me yours. Kissing underwater. Floating tits. Do kids even have to live these sorts of things anymore to learn about sex? Doesn't Google (and worse yet, 4chan) do all that heavy lifting for them?

The slow burn that was Simons complementing his very grown up adult mind with an increasingly adult body felt to me like a eulogy for the act of simultaneous sexual discovery. Maybe more like an Irish wake--it was fun to watch Simons smooth familiarity with the world betray him in this oh-so-important way.

As kids didn't we all "worry about round, wonderful girls [boys for Mags] with their edges ruined by life's little disasters, who remain solid and tough in their drive to feel good--to themselves and to you--and offer a vison of snug harbor" (137)? And wasn't the arriving at that motto half the fun?