So, first love is a freighted conversation — is my first love Eliot, from fourth grade? Kevin Mills from 9th grade? Or the unrequited kind of Timmy Lewis in fifth grade and Clint Walker in middle school? When I think of my first love, the most poignant one, I think of Buck.

He was a Pleasanton kid, a friend of my cousin Amy. We met one night at the high school football field, a night that ended in a very long ride in an ambulance from Pleasanton, Texas to San Antonio. We were just playing around, holding hands and spinning fast in a big group of kids, when my head made some pretty fast contact with another kid’s knee.

We went home, Amy making sure I got to Granny’s okay, and then in the middle of the night I started vomiting. THREE other concussions (details to come) were bike related, but this one was just youthful stupidity. I was fine — the slo-mo ambulance ride was actually kind of fun, with my mom’s full attention and the bright lights spinning around.

So, back to Buck. I guess we made a strong connection that night, and this was BACK IN THE DAY, so he wrote me a much-wanted letter. And, best of all, I still remember it, he put cologne on the letter. It was blue stationary, with black writing, and the words were not memorable. But the scent — I bet I could still pick it out in a lineup of (cheap, young man) colognes.

It was so … appealing. Sexy, really, before I was really sure what that word meant. I felt so desired, and it was such a different feeling than with my boy friends at home (almost all of whom I was about a foot taller than). I wrote him back, he wrote me again, we wrote each other at least three times. He was older than me, by a year or two — this impressed me enormously.

Eventually we realized I wouldn’t be back in Pleasanton for some time, and the words tapered off.

A few years later, when I was in late high school or college, Buck committed suicide.

I don’t know his life story, or what demons he was dealing with, but I do know that his cologne-scented letters meant a lot to me then — and still do. I wish he were still around for me to tell him thank you.