I Never Met A Becky-Liz I Didn't Like

I wonder if it is typical of the elderly to consider things to be not any longer worth the effort or do most if not all of us feel thankful for the relative lack of pressure to perform and prove ourselves. I would guess the latter may be the case for some but cannot say that this represents my personal outlook, somehow.

This pessimism of mine has existed since my college years; even when I wasn't intending on stating this a classmate sort of interpreted me in this way. In fairness to her, she was probably too busy to be introspective. She graduated with two degrees and a minor, worked her way through school, etcetera. She seemed to have anger issues if not anti psychotic medication ones. Yet there was tremendous upside to her, I thought; she ran away to French Canada to marry, supposedly. Unless of course she's a fictional character I created just to pass the time of day.

She didn't need my advice to dress warmly the last time we saw one another ( keep in mind I've been known to manufacture stories ) . She definitely was going to experience some type of extended thawing out should she last through an entire Quebec winter. This in contrast to her Deep South Gulf Coast upbringing.

She was the third child of some type of Judge or other who had overcome her share of obstacles. She flunked out of University but brought her grades up at two year college. I feel certain that things in the great white north worked out well.

An aspect of our brief friendship that I appreciated was the feeling that I was the one being pursued by someone older than me. Her enthusiasm was contagious when I said I'd spring for tickets to The Magic Flute. She was decisive about us sitting in the balcony; her public relations training/background was put to good use when we chanced to encounter one another in between classes. If it weren't for this I would've remained in my own little world, not even noticing her. Before I knew it her phone number was in my hands, although there was no commitment on my part to call. She took me home from the opera but understandably decided to not take me up on a tepid offer of tea.

I recalled details vividly, even dreamt of her once or twice over the course of the ensuing decades. She had turned down, she said one marriage proposal and was realistic in assessing my limitations as well. Only someone completely inexperienced regarding the Billy Joel equation ( tell her about it ) would feel their entire body floating almost in someone's presence and not acknowledge that to be the case then and there. We exchanged mumbled " I love you, too " kind of acknowledgements at the end of our final phone conversation. To her face I said You're beautiful and intelligent and stopped short of continuing towards what most would consider the inevitable in a similar situation.

I was reading a story here and initially made the mistake of judging the story by its title. I don't know what if anything a potentially endangered species, i.e. an actual attentive reader of mine might make of the preceding attempt at word weaving. I happen to feel a happy ending coming on strong, somewhat of a rarity for me.

Happily, the two of us are the happy couple I had envisioned us to someday become. We reconnected serendipitously and now make up a powerhouse writing team here at Vocal where our readership literally numbers somewhere in the dozens, according to the myriad of calculators necessary to tabulate our combined statistics.

Our next vacation to Jersey will include sledding on the pond of my youth. We'll park at the edge at dusk, turn on our headlights and see how many kids and their kids turn out.

Of course our chosen avocation ( vocation? ) here is a minor joy compared with the ways that we compliment one another over the course of The Days Of Our lives. Although life is still something of a soap opera, we'll always be secure in the serenity that our conjugal union represents.