We helped my parents downsize in 2005, and during the process I stumbled across my mother’s correspondence files. When I was young, long distance was very expensive, so my mother exchanged letters with quite a few people. She saved the letters she received in manila folders sorted by person and then by years, if necessary. Unfortunately, she didn’t make copies of what she wrote, so all I could read were one-sided conversations.
Mother grew up next door to her favorite cousin, Anne, who is a year or so older than mother and more like a big sister to her than she is a cousin. When Anne married, she moved about six hours away. Consequently, the files with Anne’s name on them are many.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t snoop through my mother’s letters, but there were some from Anne that I really wanted to see -- particularly those from 1976. In fact, I just couldn’t resist.
I found the Anne folders and located the batch of letters from 1976. I skimmed through until I found one where she told my mother that they were upgrading their pool from above-ground to in-ground. Then she invited us to visit. They ultimately decided that we would spend two weeks at Anne's, including the 4th of July for the bicentennial celebration.
I scanned through a few more letters and came across the one that I was looking for. Anne told my mother that she should prepare my soon-to-be 14-year-old sister for the fact that boys swam naked in their pool. Note that there was no mention that I should be prepared for that fact.
Apparently mother replied and mentioned to Anne that I was terribly modest and would therefore not be swimming naked. I wish that I could read what mother actually wrote, but I can only infer it based on Anne’s response to her. Anne basically told her that was being silly and that I’d be running around her backyard “naked as a jaybird” without a care in the world. She said it was of the joys of boyhood that mother was letting me miss out on, and Anne was determined to correct for my mother’s misguided ways. Judging by the fact that not much else was mentioned about it, mother apparently gave in very easily.
I have to say that even almost 30 years after the fact, I had a chill and even a little jolt of adrenaline from reading the letters. My penis had been my most secret thing, and nobody had seen it since I started bathing myself at age 6. I really thought no one would ever see it again! (Obviously, I didn’t know about sex.) But there in the letters was evidence of a plan to reveal my secret to the world –- to have me naked outside for two weeks! I mean, she had practically decided to make me a nudist, and my mother was going along it! And on top of that, Anne thought that my sister was the one that needed to be prepared for it!
Missing from the letters was another part of Anne’s plan. Her husband worked in marketing, and they had the first 35mm camera that I ever saw. Unlike the grainy, square photos that our Kodak Instamatic took, her camera took crystal clear, high resolution photos. She used it to take a lot of photos of me, my cousin Wayne, and Wayne’s friends playing naked around the pool and sliding on the slimy mound of clay that remained in their backyard after the pool excavation. Oh yeah, and there are some of me and Wayne standing in the bathtub.
Strangely enough, as modest as I was, once I was outside naked for a few minutes I quit thinking about the fact that I was naked. When Anne took photos of us, I wasn’t shy, and I didn’t think about who might see them one day.
Unbeknownst to me, Anne made an album of the photos from our trip, including the pool and bathtub pictures. She sent it to mother soon after we got home from the trip, but no one told me of its existence because they correctly assumed that I would have destroyed the pictures.
Mother did, however, tell my sister! In fact, as I learned years later, mother let her show the album to her friends, including at sleepovers! She even secretly showed my virgin girlfriend who never saw my dick in person.
Years later, my mother, sister, and future in-laws prepared a photo display for my wedding reception. The church where it was held had 8 foot wide rolling displays with blackboards on one side and fabric covered cork boards on the other. They lined several of them up side-by-side and placed tables in front of them. On the cork board, they arranged photos of us as we aged, starting with baby pictures at either end and meeting in the middle with the photos of us together. On the tables, they had various mementos and some photo albums.
My new bride and I were busy throughout most of the event, so we didn’t get a chance to look at the display until we were about to leave. I did notice that more people gathered around my side, but I really didn’t think anything about it.
As we were leaving, we took a moment to look at the display, which was actually very nice. We started at my bride's end, went passed the middle, and then got to my side. What I saw next sent an electrical jolt through body, along with enough adrenaline to take my breath away. There, for everyone to see, were 8x10 enlargements of several of the naked pool photos, along with a naked bathtub photo. Laying open on the table was the album with more pool photos. I wanted to grab them all and escape, but I couldn’t. I had to act like I wasn't embarrassed and laugh along with everyone else.
There were a lot of people at our wedding: family, friends, coworkers, new in-laws, all of my wife’s friends, and who knows who else. The 9-year-old inside is still dying of embarrassment to this day! Anne happily exposed my most secret of secrets in real time to the people who were at her house, to neighbors who might have looked out at her pool, and possibly to people driving by, but she went beyond that. But it didn't stop there. She also shared photos of my most secret of secrets, and my sister shared them with basically everyone I knew, plus many that I didn’t.
In retrospect, I’m glad for the experience. I’m glad Anne briefly turned me into a little nudist, and wish that we lived closer to her so she could have kept me swimming naked for years. I’m even glad my sister shared the photos with so many people. Even so, it still embarrasses the hell out of me!
The one thing I regret is that my mother and sister kept the album a secret from me. I wish that I had known it existed, I wish that I had witnessed my mother showing it to people, I wish that I had witnessed my sister showing it to her friends, and I wish I had watched as she carried it to school to take to sleep overs. The embarrassment would have been off the scale, but the memories would have been worth it!
