In my youth...
Back in the late 1960's, I had as many hobbies as the typical American teenage boy. The Yankees, DC comics and James Bond movies were among my vices, and seemed they would always be my major interests until I started noticing girls. At that point, everything else took a back seat to trying to attract them, even though my awkward attempts at that would often fail miserably.
There were some really cute girls around there, but when it came down to it, my dream girl wasn't a girl at all, but a woman. I think I was always in love with her, even when I was a little kid, but it wasn't until much later that I realized that.
She was the mother of a good friend of mine, and to be honest, I know that I spent a lot of time around Leo just to be around her. If it wasn't for her, I suspect I wouldn't have been as close to Leo as I was. He was a year ahead of me in school, husky and not real popular, but I thought he was okay.
His mother though - now she was a goddess to my eyes, although that proves that love is blind, because to look back at the couple of photos I still have of her with me and Leo, you wouldn't call her a raving beauty. You wouldn't, most likely, but I did.
Leo's parents had both come here from Italy after the second world war, just after they married and a few years before he was born, determined to make a new life. They became citizens and learned the language, although Mrs. Panetta still had an accent that betrayed her roots.
Back in 1970 she was in her mid 40's. Mrs. Panetta - her first name was Connie which was short for Concetta - was about 5'6", and during the years I knew her I started out being a head shorter than her and ended up about that much taller than she was when I stopped growing.
There wasn't a Mr. Panetta around any more. He had been killed in an industrial accident before I started hanging around Leo, which had to be a bummer for both of them.
Mrs. Panetta wasn't a slender woman by the standards of that era, which would make her plump these days judging by the anorexic looks of many of the women considered beautiful these days. Solid, not fat, but thickly built.
Her face reminded me of the woman whose face used to be on the advertisements for Celeste pizza. She was Italian and truly looked it, with her rich olive toned skin and her jet black hair which was wavy and so thick looking that I always wanted to run my fingers through it.
Mrs. Panetta always wore these rather plain looking house dresses. To the casual observer, one would think that she only had one dress and wore it everyday, but I was such an a staunch observer that I knew better. She had at least a half dozen of them, even though they were pretty much the same style. Only the colors and the patterns were different.
They came down below her knees, which was a shame because I knew from the brief glances I would get that she had nice legs, more slender than you would imagine from the rest of her body. The dresses didn't flatter the rest of her either. She was what they used to call a "bosomy" woman. In our teenage vernacular, that meant Mrs. Panetta had big tits, even though she never flaunted them and almost always kept them hidden.
The one time I did get a bit of a look at them, the image was so strong that it remains burned in my memory even today. Leo had coaxed his mother into taking us to a nearby lake during a heat wave, and to my surprise Mrs. Panetta stuck around to take a dip.
Her bathing suit was very puritan even by the standards of the time, a grey fully cut one piece that she probably hadn't wore in years. It was snug on her, and she spent a lot of time fiddling with it as it rode up on her in a few places. When the leg openings moved up, I caught glimpses of her pubic hair peeking out at the insides of her thighs, which made my own bathing suit a bit crowded.
Like I said, it was a different era, long before women began waxing and obsessing about hair removal, so it wasn't all that unusual to get a peek at pubic hair like that. That was probably part of my being intrigued by natural women from the start.
Mrs. Panetta didn't shave her underarms either. This I already knew from getting frequent glances at her armpits courtesy of the house dresses she wore, which had these little sleeves that cupped the tops of her round shoulders but left her underarms exposed for my eyes whenever she would reach upwards for things in the cupboard or take clothes off the line.
We had a girl in our school, Fawn Monroe, who was a hippie before we even knew such a thing existed, and she didn't shave her pits either. A lot of guys made fun of her, and I admit that I laughed along with everybody else, but the fact was that it really turned me on.
With Mrs. Panetta in the bathing suit, there was no peeking necessary because it was all there for the viewing, and Mrs. Panetta was generously endowed. Her armpits were filled with thick tufts of jet black hair, so much so that even with her arms at her side some of the hair peeked out. Her legs were shaved, although she had some down on her thighs.
Although he said nothing and I never raised the subject either, my friend Leo was obviously embarrassed my his mother and her armpit hair, and I saw him cringe whenever she would raise her arms when somebody else was nearby. His shame did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm and adoration though, and all that day I was in heaven.
The only thing that distracted my attention from her armpits were her breasts. Even in the matronly bathing suit there was no hiding those beauties, and I know that I must have made her uncomfortable the way I kept staring at them, because she caught me drooling over her a number of times during the day.
42DD. That was the size of the bra she wore. I knew that from doing detective work at their house, finding one of the over-sized harness in the clothes hamper and examining the huge cups intensely, trying to imagine what the jugs that filled the bra looked like.
Seeing Mrs. Panetta's breasts swaying in that bathing suit all day drove me wild. Sadly, that was the only time I ever got to see Mrs. Panetta in a bathing suit, despite my suggesting another trip to the lake to Leo every chance I got. I suspect that my leering might have freaked Mrs. Panetta out, or maybe Leo might have even noticed my obsession with his Mom. It wasn't like I was all that subtle, even by a teenager's standards.
Becoming a man...
When Leo graduated from high school, he joined the Navy, which found me needing to think up reasons to visit the Panetta household. Going from a daily dose of Connie Panetta's magnificent assets to just random peeks on the street or at church would not do for a red blooded American 18 year old.
I started to make regular stops at Mrs. Panetta's house, just being a good neighbor of course, to inquire whether or not she needed anything at the store. Since I had been pretty much a fixture around the place anyway, Connie Panetta didn't seem to mind, and since college was a couple of months away I had nothing but time since my evening job stocking shelves at the supermarket was only part-time.
As a matter of fact, I think she might have been lonely since Leo had entered the service. Now with the house empty, my company seemed to lift her spirits. She began to cook again like she had when Leo was home, making big pots of sauce and rolling meatballs, knowing that I would stick around and eat with her.
One day Mrs. Panetta gave me a cooking class, showing me how to roll meatballs in my hands so they they would stay together as they cooked. I wasn't very good at it, but that was because I was busy watching her breasts sway around as she balled up the meat between her olive-toned hands.
"I'm gonna make a chef outta you yet, Jimmy," Mrs. Panetta declared in that lyrical voice of hers, with just a trace of an Italian accent left over from long ago. "Soon you'll be cooking for your Mom and Dad. You're gonna be a regular Chef Boyardee!"
I had little interest in cooking, because I was just there to be near Connie Panetta, but I laughed and told her that I was happy to learn.
"I'm a willing student," I assured Mrs. Panetta.
"Women love a man who knows his way around a kitchen," she said as she gave me a nudge. "You know, my brother has a daughter about your age."
Mrs. Panetta proceeded to tell me all about this girl that I didn't have the slightest interest in meeting, especially when she said she was 14.
"I just got my draft card last week," I told Mrs. Panetta, who laughed when she saw I was a little peeved at her. "I don't need to go to jail."
