When I look back at that time of my life, I'm always amazed at how much things have changed but also at how some things are the same. True, we didn't have social media to spread new words for things in less time that it takes me to type this on my laptop, so some of the words of today didn't exist back then. What today's words mean was just as alive back then as it is today though. People just usually didn't talk as openly about those things as they do today. If I had known then what I know now...
I got involved in Scouting as a Cub Scout in grade school and loved every second of it. I ate up all the projects and earned every rank as soon as I could. After that came Boy Scouts, and I loved that too. I suppose it was every Scout's fantasy back then to be a rugged outdoorsman and live off the land because that's what we spent a lot of time trying to do.
The Cannon County State Park is where my Scout troop went camping every month. It was a little wilder back then, or at least that's how I remember it. We could hike for a couple miles back into the trees to our favorite campsite and set up our tents for the weekend, and we wouldn't see anybody else for the entire time.
Our campsite was beside a small river that ran through the park. That river wasn't very big as rivers go, but it had bream, catfish, and bass you could catch with the crawdads and minnows Mr. Reynolds seined for us. We spent our summer camping trips fishing and learning about nature. We spent our winter camping trips tracking animals if there was snow and trying to stay warm.
All that changed when I turned eighteen that spring and graduated from high school. That meant I put away my Scout uniform and stopped going to the weekly meetings. Part of the reason was I was a man now and Boy Scouts were sort of kid stuff. The other reason was I got a job working the eleven to seven shift in a factory.
I didn't miss the Scout meetings but I did miss the camping trips the troop took every month. I had other things to do though, so I worked all that first summer to save enough for the down payment on a used car. It was October when I rented my first apartment and moved out of Mom and Dad's house. It felt good to be on my own. I didn't think much about camping during the winter. Somehow, sleeping in a tent and freezing my ass off didn't hold the same thrill as it had a year before.
That old attraction of the outdoors came back as soon as the leaves started growing back on the trees that spring. Tennessee had it's usual spring, which meant lots of rain, but that rain made everything explode into canopies of green and the road shoulders started sprouting a myriad other colors as the wildflowers woke up from their winter nap.
I was driving to work through all that one afternoon and decided I wanted to be outside in those colors and breathing the slightly fishy smell of the air beside a river again. There was nothing to stop me. I'd have to go by myself, but in some ways that was better. The next weekend I stopped by the Army surplus store in town and bought a pup tent.
The first weekend in June promised to be sunny and not too hot. I stopped by Mom and Dad's house before I went to work on Friday to pick up my old sleeping bag and other camping gear, then bought some groceries that didn't need refrigeration.
I didn't go back to that old Scout campsite. It was sort of too high school I guess. Instead, I called the farmer who owns the land along the river next to the park. I'd been there before when Mr. Reynolds had taken us on a hike to find edible plants, and I'd worked tobacco and baled hay for the farmer a couple of summers during high school. The guy remembered me and said I could camp there any time I wanted as long as I cleaned up my trash. I parked my car on the lane that ran beside the trees, walked the hundred yards to the river and set up my pup tent, started a fire, and then went to catch a few crawdads for bait.
That weekend was fantastic. I caught a few fish, watched the ducks swim in the river, and let the croaking frogs sing me to sleep at night. In general, I just had a good time doing nothing. When I got back to my apartment, I'd decided I'd have to go back at least every other weekend unless I was working.
My job on the assembly line was putting two pieces of a valve together with three screws after Virginia, the woman up the line from my station had lubed and put an o-ring on the valve spool. Since her station was close to mine, Virginia and I talked on and off every day.
It was fun talking with Virginia for several reasons. One was that she had a real sense of humor and she didn't seem to have any modesty about what she said.
To put the o-ring on her part of the valve, she had to dip them in oil and then stretch them over the part. The o-rings were made of rubber and the grooves in the valve body where they went had sharp edges. To prevent the o-rings from being cut during the installation process, Virginia used a tool called a "bullet".
The bullet was a nylon cylinder with a rounded point on one end and a hole as big as the valve in the other. The hole in the bullet was just a little bigger than the valve bullet was just deep enough to stretch the o-ring enough to fit past the sharp edge of the groove in the valve. Then the o-ring would slide off the bullet and into the groove. The bullet did sort of look like a real bullet except it was a little over an inch in diameter, and where the end of the bullet would have a rim, that's where it was hollow. Virginia thought her bullet looked like something else.
I guess I'd led a pretty sheltered life up until then. My first day at work, Virginia grinned at me and introduced herself. The buzzer for the start of the shift went off then. and Virginia said, "Well off I go to play with my dildo again."
I must have looked at her funny, because she chuckled.
"What?"
"What's a dildo?"
I felt like a fool when she started laughing, but I'd never heard the term before. When she finally stopped, she held up her bullet.
"It's one of these. They call them bullets, but they look like dildos to me."
"What do you use them for?"
Virginia grinned again.
"You mean these or a regular dildo?"
"Well, both, I guess."
Virgina dipped an o-ring in the little cup of lube at her station and then slid it down over the rounded end of the bullet.
"See, this is what I use them for here. They stretch out the ring so it's easier to put on and doesn't get cut. The lube is so they slide on easier."
Virginia grinned even bigger then.
"A dildo does the same thing except you don't put a ring on it. You put it in something. I'll give you a couple hints about what you put it in. That something doesn't usually need to be lubed and the more it gets stretched, the better if feels."
Virginia stood there chuckling until I realized what she was talking about.
"Oh."
She giggled.
"You never heard of that before?"
"No, I guess not."
"Well, now you have. I wonder what else you've never heard about. I'll have to find out one of these days. Right now, Harold is watching us so we better get to work."
The other reason talking to Virginia was fun is what she wore to work. Most of the women tried to look nice and they could because the work was relatively clean. They wore pants and blouses or sweaters mostly, and while it was obvious they were women, none of their clothes fit tight enough to show much. Virginia was just as modest about how she dressed as she was about how she talked.
She always wore pants and blouses or sweaters too, but her pants fit her round ass pretty tight, and if the blouse had buttons, the top ones would be open almost down to her bra. I knew that because when she bent over to push the bullet down over the valve body, I'd see the top of her bra cup where the strap hooked on and some of her breast. Her sweaters were the same way if they had buttons. Even if they didn't they always fit her like a second skin. Virginia's breasts weren't as big as some, but they were big enough to make me dream about her at night.
I'd probably have tried to get to know her better if we'd been closer in age, but I figured Virginia for about fifty and I was still just eighteen. She didn't act or talk like fifty, so I was still tempted, but thought she'd probably just laugh at me again.
I also wondered if she was really into men. Virginia wasn't married, and she was pretty enough and sexy enough several men from other departments talked to her at breaks and lunch. She never seemed to do any more with them, or at least she never said anything to me about it if she did.
