Kissing Bill French

from The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love

by Jill Conner Browne

“Do what you will wish you had done when you were young.”  Everybody has heard this sage advice.

It goes beyond just the doing or not doing, though.  If you decide in favor of doing  and it turns out to be good, do a lot of it.  You never now how short the supply might be.  Some things in life are just so... sweet—and sweet is really not strong enough—I mean, so soothing and delicious that sometimes the memory of them is all you need to get by.

Kissing Bill French was one of those sweet things in my life.  Bill French—and we always called him by both names, never just Bill—was, in my considered opinion, the Best Kisser in the History of the Entire World, living or dead.  He just had a magic mouth. I could die happy right this minute if I could die kissing Bill French.

Kissing Bill French was one of those incredibly sweet things that, when times are really bad, I could just think about and feel better.  I’d say to myself, “You know, if I wanted to, I could just get in my car and drive to Birmingham and kiss Bill French and feel a whole lot better”. No matter that it wasn’t actually feasible, that both of us were married to somebody else, that we’d had no contact in years, and that I wouldn’t really know where to find him. It was just something I held out for myself.

And then one day on impulse I called a mutual friend, Peter Binder, in Birmingham and we were yakkin’ away about old times and I mentioned Bill French.  Peter was suddenly silent.  Well, come to find out Bill had been killed in a plane crash a year or so before and nobody knew how to call me.  It hit me like an avalanche.  I grieved and grieved over it.  To find out that not only was he gone, he had been gone.  I will never again in this life kiss Bill French.  That knowledge makes me feel like my whole body has turned to liquid and it’s coming out my eyes.

Here’s the deal, though:  One day... one day I’ll get to heaven, and when I do, the first thing I’m going to do is drink a cold one with my daddy, and pet my old dog Randy, and then I’ll get Elvis to sing somethin’, and I am going to dance ‘til I drop.  And in between sets, and on all the slow songs, I’m gonna kiss Bill French.  Then I’ll know for sure I am in heaven.