The kiss

Mir wrote a Friday Flashback piece on memorable kisses, and asked her readers to share their experiences. Mine overflowed the comments box, so I'm posting it here for her:

I am surprised and ashamed to say that I can't remember my actual first kiss, but there was one absolutely heavenly kiss that I do remember in vivid detail, a quarter-century later: the Platonic Ideal of kisses.

I was at Ronnie Scott's jazz club with a lovely Israeli girl whom I'd chatted up in the street (man, I had confidence in those days!). Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers were playing, featuring on that particular tour a chubby little boy named Terrence Blanchard on trumpet, he couldn't possibly have been older than sixteen.

As the band began a very mellow and slow song, she smiled and snuggled back against me, so I wrapped my arms around her and kissed the back of her neck (as one does). She turned her face to mine, I brought my lips down to hers - and the world stood still. The club, the crowd, the music: gone. I don't know how long we kissed, it might have been five seconds or twenty minutes. The only thing I was aware of, outside the kiss itself, was her heart beating in the palm of my hand.

Without either of us seeming to break it off, our lips parted and she rubbed her cheek against mine. In that moment, the band fell silent and Terrence Blanchard stepped forward to play a wonderful melancholy, wistful, yearning solo.

Perfect.