If I could do it all over again, what would I change? I get that question a lot. I think I have, and have had, a great life, and I wouldn’t change much of anything. Yesterday though, while doing my daily exercise at the beach, I gave it some thought in between being sidetracked by a pretty woman in skimpy beach attire who was laying out on the sand. Here’s some of what I came up with.I was the oldest of three boys. It seemed like any time one of the other two did something wrong, or didn’t do something they were supposed to do, Mom blamed me as much as she blamed them. So, maybe if I lived my life all over again, I wouldn’t want to be the oldest child in the family. There are pros and cons; I wouldn’t want the hand-me-down clothes, but I wouldn’t have to be the built-in babysitter, either, or be the one to hike through knee-high snow to bring my firefighter Dad his supper at the firehouse a half mile away.

My brothers and I attended a Catholic grade school, one where the nuns really DID slap our knuckles with rulers if our handwriting was sloppy or we were caught throwing paper airplanes out the window, or a host of other so-called violations. In those days, spanking or being stood in a corner was an acceptable form of parental punishment, so arriving home from school with telltale red or bloodied knuckles meant trouble.

Another school negative was having to go to confession every Friday afternoon, and having to put up with the confessional lectures from Father “X” or Father “Y” or Father “Z” for the number of times I “spilt the seed of life upon the earth” (translation, masturbating) during the previous week. My brothers and I were altar boys, so the priests easily recognized my voice in the confessional, and one threatened to not let me serve Mass for a month – Mom would have hit the roof if that had happened. Bottom line, if I could do it all over again, I’d opt for public school where there was actually math and science being taught in place of all the religious stuff being stuffed into our heads.

Sometime during the hot summer before my 10th or 11th birthday, my cousin Carole and I snuck into the attic and touched each other’s privates. Heck, at that age, we boys had heard that girls didn’t have pee-pees like us guys, and I assumed that they urinated out their rectums. It was sizzling hot in the attic, but she pulled down our shorts and rubbed up against me and I saw this thing that looked like a slit near her crotch. We never kissed, just explored and touched. When we thought we heard the backyard screen door open, we hurriedly dressed and waited until we heard the icebox door shut and the person leave (to this day, I have no idea who it was, but there was basketball and badminton being played in the backyard, so it could have been one of her siblings or parents, or one of mine (God forbid, if we had gotten caught). If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have had my first “sorta” sexual experience in a hot attic with insulation fibers getting all over us.

A few weeks later, my cousins Vivian, Carol, and I were washing dishes from an extended-family outdoor supper while everyone was sitting outdoors counting stars, and Carole whispered something to Vivian and then reached down my pants and let Vivian see my thingy. It was then that I dropped a pan I was drying and heard an uncle ask if we were ok. That scared us into getting back to doing our chores. The following summer, while at another cousin’s house where our families sometimes met for fishing and to watch the Friday Night Boxing Fights on a black and white TV with huge rabbit ears, Marylou asked me if I could “grow.” One of her girlfriend’s 12 or 13 year old brothers had showed them his erection, so she wanted to see mine. Marylou seemed disappointed at first that I was soft, but the excitement of the situation quickly got me hard and she smiled.

For many years after that, she and I would sneak around their lakeside property and find places where she could watch me spew ejaculate (I learned to bring toilet paper in my back pocket to wipe off with afterwards) – we never had sex per se, but we masturbated together. As she started to show signs of breast development, I would touch her chest while she stuck her fingers inside herself and climaxed – I loved how she rolled her eyes and shuddered in delight afterwards.

OK, if I had it to do over, I would have stayed away from those three female cousins; it just wasn’t morally correct to “play” with them at our young ages (maybe older neighborhood girls would have been ok, though!).

Gosh, I thought I could get up to age 25-30 or more in this column, but I got stuck in my pre-teen and early teen years. Maybe, down the road, I’ll pick things up and expose even more of what made me such a sex-oriented person, sometimes called a “pervert.” I guess this thinking back to my past is helping me remember things for my future book, now tentatively titled “From Altar Boy to Porn Star.”

One thing’s for sure, though, I should start including more of my present day sex escapades in these monthly columns, right? Right!

Enjoy the rest of your summer, stay out of attics that have exposed insulation fibers, use the automatic dishwasher, and no partying with first cousins!