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Sex Education I: The Land of the Lay
[Author’s Note: My memoir, Lighting the Fire: A Cherokee Journey from Dropout to Professor, was published in June by Miniver Press. Thanks to Covid-19, I have been unable to promote it. Drawing a crowd might sell books, but it certainly kills people. I intend to adopt pieces of it to magazine format if there is an audience. I understand this is not the kind of thing I normally publish on Medium, and I assure one and all that it won’t happen again unless people like it. SR]
Puberty hit me in the fifties, right below the Bible Belt. My kids — both the boys and the girls — would find it all hilarious.
I do, too, if I’m thinking of Peter Sellers playing me in a movie rather than how it felt at the time to be ignorant of female anatomy and not even know a great deal about my own.
I was raised by my elderly grandparents, and they were not equipped to tell me much even if they could get past the emotional blocks. My earliest investigation was — I am not making this up — -looking for pertinent words in the unabridged dictionary at the public library. They often had drawings that were not completely useless.
I shall not forget how I saw my first adult female nipple (not counting when I mercilessly used my height to peer down the…
