Until I was seven years old, my family lived in a teesny-tiny little rental house at 819 South Roosevelt Street in Green Bay, Wisconsin, between the Kasners and the Wardens. How is it I can recall trivial crap like this when I can barely remember to zip my fly after visiting the bathroom? I’m never going to figure that out.

The Kasners were an old couple who lived alone but were occasionally visited by Sally. I think Sally was their granddaughter, although my memory is that she’s their niece, but that doesn’t make sense because Sally was my age and the Kasners were pretty old. I would think a niece would have been older than me, so I’m going to stick with granddaughter.

Sally was kind of a sassy little thing. Being an occasional visitor she was inclined to do things the rest of us wouldn’t dare do, like climb up on the neighbor’s garden wall, or throw stones at the wasp’s nest. It was pretty exciting to have her around because she was the ultimate excuse to get away with stuff we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to get away with. If we answered the question, “What on earth were you doing that for?” with, “Sally started doing it, and we were just doing what she was doing,” all further discussion of the incident was dropped after a roll of the eyes and a heavy sigh.

Sally was also the first girl I remember kissing. We were sitting on the curb in front of my house, trying to figure out what game we were going to play, when Sally said we should play “The Virginian.” Our games were television shows, usually Saturday morning cartoons, but we would also play-act live shows, usually comedies like “The Munsters” or “Batman,” although back then I didn’t realize that “Batman” was a comedy. None of us did.

I had never seen “The Virginian” so I had to ask Sally to explain it to me. “It’s a western, so they ride horses and shoot guns a lot, but first, they kiss.” I liked westerns. Horses were cool, and any boy would go for shooting guns. The kissing was something to just get past, so we did that first. “They do it on the lips,” she said, almost as a warning, but I wasn’t bothered. Lips, cheek, whatever. I was too young to care, so I puckered up and she laid one on me.

Two, actually. This was back in the day when parents booted their kids out of the house to play right after breakfast and didn’t let them back in until lunch, so the street was teeming with kids, and although I wasn’t particularly impressed with the kissing part of our game, the rest of the kids were intensely interested and gathered round to watch. A gathering of kids is a magnet for more kids who ask, “What’s going on?” as soon as they appear, so Sally and I were asked to repeat the performance, which Sally, a natural show-off, was only to happy to do. And we did. That out of the way, we got to the good parts with the horses and guns.