Today's MOSTLY TRUE SHORT STORY: Photos in a Canvas Bag

F LoBuono

It was quite a shock. I mean, I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! I had seen photos of naked women before in magazines like Playboy, but these were nothing like those! It was the first time I would see a woman completely naked, exposing everything - including her genitalia.

I must have been about 11 or 12 when one of my friends found an old canvas mail bag in a clearing in the small patch of forest near my home. Overtaken by curiosity, of course we undid the catch holding it closed and dumped the contents out onto the forest floor.  The bag appeared to be full of newspaper clippings of some sort. On closer inspection, we discovered that they were not newspaper clippings, but rather those of some sort of magazine. It seems someone took the considerable time to cut out very explicit photos of naked women from some less than reputable magazine.

Once we figured exactly what the photos were, we poured over them like a long-lost treasure map. There must have been hundreds of them, all black and white, and stacked together like they do with large groups of cash. As I mentioned, we had all seen Playboy where beautiful women posed in classic positions exposing their breasts, but were never fully nude. These photos made those look like pictures from a children's book! First, the women may have been attractive, but certainly not in the way of the Playboy women. In fact, these women looked harder, tougher - more like street women than models. Next, they left little to the imagination. It seemed that they actually posed for MAXIMUM EXPOSURE rather than to titillate as the women of Playboy did. And, lastly, there was no comparison in the quality of the photographs or the photographers who created them.

Now, at the time (the late 1960's) I was attending a Catholic grammar school where the idea of teaching sex education was akin to teaching child molestation! It simply wasn't done. It was either up to our parents to teach us or learn it on the streets if we were ever to be comfortable with - S.E.X. I learned most of it on the streets through events like this one.

I remember my initial reaction was one of shock and amazement. I'm sure that my jaw hit the forest floor. And, to be totally honest, I was a little grossed out, too. You see, to me, a woman's vulva looked like a wound. It was shocking to me that women actually had a large hole in their bodies. I thought to myself, OMG, how to they keep water out when they are bathing and swimming? How do they keep their insides, well, inside? Baffling! The idea of sex actually never entered my mind.

Now, please keep in mind, I was only about 11 or so and had absolutely no experience, nor was I educated in the subject. So, my initial impressions were without any bias what-so-ever. In fact, you couldn't be more innocent. I was so damned curious. And, the whole idea fascinated me. I mean, they were so DIFFERENT they might as well have been aliens!

My friends and I decided that it was too risky to take any of those photos home so we packed them back up in that canvas sack and hid them again beneath some bushes. We made plans to return periodically for further study. Of course, over time, a canvas bag in the woods is no way to keep paper dry for very long. And, the fact that we came by regularly to continue our research, all added to their eventual decay. By the end of the summer, the dampness and our continued use had turned our cache into a pile of smelly, rotten filth (some might say it was that from the very beginning).

In time, of course, I learned to appreciate the beauty of the female form - in ALL it's glory. I came to appreciate that, because of their anatomy, women ARE a portal and, therefore, the progenitors of life itself. What appeared to me as a wound all those years ago, shocking and frightening, became the lock to my key of life. Who would have thunk it all those years ago . . .