The Kiss That Changed My Life

By Peter 9 Bowman

Peter was a talented violinist, a fierce computer programmer, and a social misfit. His lack of a loving partner nearly cost him everything. On a clear night in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge a kiss changed his life forever. The story is true, some names have been changed, the feelings have not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter 9 Bowman
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310703331

Peter 9 Bowman

Peter 9 Bowman is an author previously published under another nom de plume who lives and writes from a six acre mountainside homestead in New Hampshire that he and his wife maintain for the benefit of their chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, and ghosts of bunnies dispatched by predators unknown. He has spent a career homesteading on the digital frontier, having founded several technology ventures, and now chops firewood to heat his modest hundred year old farm house. He'd be happy to hear from you at [e-mail] .

Book preview

The Kiss

…that changed my life.

©2015 Peter 9 Bowman

High school, senior year. I’m a frog waiting for my princess. Misery, loneliness, isolation – I do no homework, join no clubs, have no social life. At home I nap, play violin, and scribble equations on graph paper – strange equations, hard equations, bend your mind equations. If only I can see the pattern in primes, prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, find an odd perfect number...

My parents are worried. They’re certainly sympathetic enough – but irrelevant. A teacher tries to help. She can’t. It’s not their approval I’m missing. Life sucks.

I take first chair in a Central Jersey violin audition. Concertmaster – nice, but irrelevant. I ace my math boards, get christened a Merit Scholar, win a statewide math contest. Nice, but irrelevant. I’d trade it all for a single smile from a girl – any girl. Can I please her? How about her? I’m unworthy, a virgin’s virgin. I am the defective chicken to be pecked out of the flock – cleft lip, cleft palate, cleft life. Of two-thousand kids in my school, I’m the only one. My real talent: daydreaming.

My mother has been saving. She hands me an envelope and watches my face for a reaction. Five crisp fifty-dollar bills. Embarrassed, I thank her. She doesn’t know that won’t even cover textbooks. With doctor bills and mortgage payments, I know how hard it was with my father’s factory wages for her to put that aside.

A letter arrives postmarked Pittsburgh. It’s a full scholarship to study physics at Carnegie Tech. My daydreaming shifts into overdrive. I’m headed to utopia. The Greek life. It’s all there in a color brochure. The Greek life. I imagine debating the great issues of the day, partnering with the girl of my dreams and finding a way to make a difference. Hour after hour I lie in bed staring at an aerial photo of the campus, seeing my future. The Greek life – Aristotle, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato are waiting for me on campus.

Freshman Orientation – six days of exploration before classes start. I’m ready. My trunk holds everything I need for my new life. I meet some classmates. I’m confused. Where are the Greeks, the philosophers, the deep thinkers? The only thing Greek here are letters on frat houses with beer fueled parties and makeout rooms. I thought I left this behind. Nothing has changed. This isn’t what I thought it would be.

I head to the park next to campus – four-hundred wooded acres. Walking through the trails, I whistle a Paganini caprice to let my intended know I’ve arrived. I’m waiting for a goddess to leap out of a bush and claim her prize. No leaping. No goddess. Alone again. Just me and that hollow ache.

Classes start. Alice Sucotti is in my freshman English Comp class. She’s a Chem E. major. When she sits, auburn hair falls across the back of her chair nearly touching the floor. I’ve never seen such hair. I’m a salmon to her waterfall. She has the body of a twelve year old boy – skinny, no makeup, a widow’s peak that reminds me of Minnie Mouse. Her spindly arms spring from a torso that almost looks too small to support her head. But the mind inside that head sets me on fire. At last. I’ve found her.

Roger Brindly, our instructor, stands before us five periods a week and reads aloud from Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth. His cheeks