I was tooling around in the ol' Sneeze archives and came across something that made me laugh.

Sometime last year I had put up a post asking all about the curious sexual act of "petting", and requested readers to get the opinion of any old people in their lives on what it actually means.

Somewhere in the middle of all the comments was the 2-part response I had included from my Dad. It's great...

On the phone, my dad (64) first said (with much cute fumfering)...

"That was something we usually associated with frustration. It usually meant a lot of huffin' and puffin' and smoochin' and stuff like that. But that was it. A lot of smoke.

It was a nice way of saying it without using a lot of words we didn't want to use."

He then followed that up with this email:

Hi,

That term was used, as far as I can remember, back in the forties. In the fifties we use to call it making out. Different degrees like heavy etc. mostly with clothing still on but perhaps not covering the same parts of the anatomy that you started out with.

Then of course, the next day you had the baseball talk, how far did you get? 1st base, 2nd base, 3rd base and the ever elusive homerun.

love,
poppa

"The ever elusive homerun." He's the best.

You can find the original petting post and comments here.