Maybe I shouldn't have jumped into the shower at that moment, or perhaps I should have hidden the stone better, but what happened next really drove home the need for more caution rather than less.
I wasn't actually in my bedroom when it happened, but from what I found out later, I can piece together the facts. You see, it was washing day.
As I undressed in the bathroom and turned on the taps, my mother came upstairs and was rummaging through my room, looking for dirty clothes. It seems she'd known about my dirty magazine's for quite some time, and while she wasn't about to clean them let alone touch them, she decided those noxious socks had to go. Of course she had pulled the socks out from under the cupboard and they had snagged the box containing the wishing stone.
My mother had eyed the box suspiciously for a while, and was about to put it back under the cupboard, but tipped it upside down so the stone fell out. When she picked up the stone she was reminded of a time long ago during her own adolescence. Apparently long before she met my father, my mother as a teenager had the attention of a number of young men, she was the popular girl at her school during the seventies.
Back in those days her parents, my Grandma and Grandpa, were fairly strict on who their daughter would date, only a handful ever made the grade. But it was a time of free love and flower power, and of all the boys who followed her around, angling for a date, there was one who was willing to go that little step further.
A guy named David Whitehouse, or Mad Dave to his friends. My mother recalled most vividly how late one night, Mad Dave risked Grandpa's wrath, and began throwing rocks up at her window to get her attention. She remembered how he threw the third rock as she opened the window, only to be hit in the forehead.
Mum was fine and she invited Mad Dave up to her room via the drainpipe, initially to give him a stern talking to. But that stern talking to devolved into my mothers first night of passion with a young man. It was a strong memory and it seemed to her like only yesterday.
As my mother sat on the end of my bed, and I was standing naked under a warm stream of water, she pondered the memory of the loss of her virginity. It was then she spoke out loud .
