I’m A Sixty-Year-Old Virgin
A do-over forty-plus years in the making.
I find myself in a very peculiar place in time where age, virginity, and sex don’t usually intersect. So how did I get to be sixty and a virgin? Twist of fate? Benjamin Button disease? Did I leave the nunnery? These are all excellent questions, but I should start from the beginning.
I was born into a very Catholic household, attending mass weekly and on holy days of obligation and confessing my sins to a priest through a small yellow-tinted perforated glass window. I was an altar boy for about three years while attending Catholic school. Luckily the priest in my parish did not touch little boys except maybe to tap us on the shoulder to get our attention, which was better than the swats on the back of the hand with a ruler administered by the nuns. Yes, I survived Catholic school and my years as an altar boy unscathed.
Recalling the lyric from Only the Good Die Young by Billy Joel, “Catholic girls start much too late,” in my little town, many started early. Being the shy late-blooming good Catholic boy I was, puberty came with no considerable fanfare. Most of the sex education I learned came from the Catholic school playground and junior and high school locker rooms.
I was short and chubby as a kid, thanks to my love of bread and my mother’s tortillas…
