WHEN BOYS STILL TOASTED GIRLS

I remember the good old days when I was young, naïve, innocent and completely gullible. My mum has five kids; four of us are girls and one boy to complete the mix. My mum was worried about protecting us from men so she cooked up certain lies that would make us scared of getting too close to any male figures that were not family oriented. We believed everything my mum told us hook, line and sinker. She always had this grave expression on her face when she was talking to us about men; it was as if she was telling us the most important secrets that we were the only ones privy to such delicate information.

She told my baby sister that she could get pregnant if a man touched her.

She told me I could become pregnant if when I started menstruating and I let boys get too close to me.

She told me I would not find a husband if I lost my virginity before I got married

My dad was an even worse case, he was so jealous of his girls. He didn’t want us to have male visitors but when we started hanging out with our friends outside of the home he demanded supervised visits where he would grumble to my mum the whole time about how we had too many male friends and he would clock the visits to not exceed more than one hour thirty minutes. It was crazy!!! My senior sister Ugochi was the worst hit because she is one of the finest girls in our neighborhood; young, hot blooded guys were always trooping in to pay her visits, it was hard to even remember their names sometimes. My dad drove some away with his bare fist raised in the air, but it didn’t deter them. Hehehe. Men can be really determined when they find something they want.

I was a late bloomer in everything that concerned women, I didn’t find boys important, and I had more serious concerns with sports, current affairs and academics.  I would watch my sister Ugochi get toasted all the time and sometimes when I was idle I would wonder…when will it be my turn.

I remember the first time I was toasted; it lasted all about 8 seconds. I was in JSS 2, we were on break from school, it was night time and I was out running an errand for my mum, I was nearing home when three guys walked past by. The one in the middle caught my eye, he was young about 13 years, wearing a pair of slippers and carrying soccer boots on his hands. He started at me… hard and I felt it seep right into me… and he looked into my eyes and said “hello fine girl, you look beautiful”. I walked past without answering, his friends whistled, he smiled and it was over. I never saw him again, but I will always how good it felt to get a compliment.

Back in the days boys were still boys. They put time, planning and effort into toasting girls. It was like, you had to possess mad skills, good looks and confidence to get the girl you wanted. We didn’t have telephones, or the internet and Nipost sometimes took two months to deliver a letter, so they had to improvise. Secondary school was a good example, some of these boys could have become the next Wole Soyinka with the type of poems they were sending as letter to young ladies in my school. The popular girls in the Senior Secondary School received the most letters. They read it out to brag to their friends about how much attention they were getting from boys back home… We all thought the lines they were dropping were so cool…Lines like;

You are the sugar in my tea

 The cockroach in my cupboard

 The apple of my eyes

 The reason I wake up in the morning

 My missing rib

You make me speechless with your beauty baby

The pillar of my strength

I will die for you

I will make you breakfast in the morning

I will love you forever

I will remove suffering from your life

I will never follow another girl

Bla bla bla

We would all cooo….and aaaah……and swoon at the adorable ridiculousness of it all.

Sometimes words were not enough and they would use cassette players to convey their feelings

If the girl was still playing hard to get they would find ways to pay her a visit during the holidays.

I remember one time, during the holidays, my dad had us on a tight leash, because we were all turning into young adults and he was afraid we were growing too fast. There was this guy who had been following me around for almost six months, he just wouldn’t give up. One day, we were home watching tv in the night and I heard a knock on the door, my dad was still at the shop and my mum was out, I went to open the door and I saw this same young teenager, kneeling on the floor, his hands stretched out asking me to be his girl friend. I was too shocked to be anything but stupefied, I tried to close the door but he started begging. I was so scared my dad was going to walk in any minute and scatter his head with a pestle if he saw a young teenager at his house in the night asking his daughter out on bended knees. My sisters were at loss for words. The guy took a lot of risk, what if I wasn’t the one who came to the door? What if my mum was home? What if my dad saw him? All hell would have been let loose there at the thought of the last event even remotely happening. But I admired his guts and even if I still turned him down because my mind was set on not having a boyfriend until I was in the university I smiled in my heart for a little while every time I saw him walk by in the streets.

It was not a do or die affair. Boys were bold, they were willing to take risk, climb fences, wait for hours, get turned down, and be laughed at. Sometimes they got the girl, sometimes they didn’t, they just tried harder and when they were tired of trying, they moved on. Tough luck!!! They said, you don’t always get the girl of your dreams except your name is Tom Hanks with a cute boyish irresistible charm. You may hurt their ego but you just couldn’t break their spirit. It was so much fun, because it was harmless.

These days, with the popularity of the internet, everything is easy. Nipost has been pushed back like 2004, sms, email, bbm chat, 2go, yahoo messenger, aim talk, google chat, ichat, whatsapp, hotmail messenger, Skype, etc the list is endless. You don’t even have to be there to ask a girl out, in fact they no longer call it toasting, now it’s so many things…trying to catch fish, searching for a fling, looking for a one night stand, asking her out, etc. They don’t even have to try too hard, but it’s harder now, because some boys don’t know how to take NO for an answer, I hear stories of women having acid thrown at them because they turned some guy down and if he can’t have her then no one else can, I hear stories of young men who gang rape girls because these women turned them down rudely. They don’t even have to speak anymore, a bottle of Smirnoff ice and a plate of nkwobi and they follow you home.

I was sitting with a dude on Saturday in a bus and he was trying to ‘ask me out’. He must have thought hard for what to say because his lines were so lame I almost laughed in his face. He said…” Your hands are beautiful, I love your fingers”. I looked at him long and hard. I bite my nails; they are chirped, ugly and have no beauty. My nails are bent inwards from all the biting it has suffered, in fact am sure if it has a choice it will run from me in the next life, and here I was in this bus and some guy is telling me I have beautiful nails. Next he picks up his phone and types a message in it, passes it me and asks me to read it. Am sitting right next to him and he can’t talk to me, he is typing the message he wants to use to ask me out on a phone and expects me to be impressed. Oh how the skills of men have waned… What happened to beautiful crafted letters in papers that had flower designs on them and reeked of cheap perfume?

The guys I like, are the ones who are too shy to ask me out, the ones who invite me over but stumble over their words because they are nervous and don’t know how to articulate their feelings, so they settle for being friends, they get to know me first, we get comfortable and after a time…one day it just pops out, and it isn’t strange or awkward because we have established a feeling of comfort among us. Those are the type of men who win my heart every single time.

So drop your comments ladies, tell us the most outrageous toasting you have received when you were growing up and guys tell us the girls who embarrassed you the most. It’s going to be so much fun to laugh at the younger version of ourselves and the things we did for young love.