It was the summer of 1967, that's the closest I can come to a date. I had been back for Asia for about two weeks when my uncle called.

"Hey Marty, what you gonna do tonight?"

"Hell the same thing I have done every night since I got home. I'm gonna find a bar and try to get lucky."

"Instead of doing that come over to the club."

"Come on Uncle Deacon, The VFW is for old guys."

"Come on, you are entitled to join now."

"So this is a recruiting campaign?"

"Not really, we can have a steak and a couple of beers. Then if you are bored, take off for a hippy joint."

"I guess if you don't know any better, a college bar looks like a hippy joint. Okay Deacon I will show up for a steak and a beer. That is one beer."

Eight P.M. found me at the frame building that housed the FVW. I explained to the gate keeper who I was and why I had showed up there. He called inside for Uncle Deacon. I knew Deacon was somewhere in the club because I had seen his 1958 Ford Fairlane convertible in the parking lot. It took him a couple of minutes to reach the door and vouch me in.

"Come on in we have been waiting for you." Before I could ask about the we, I stood over a table with two women. One was at least forty which seemed really old to me, and the other was closer to my own age. The lights were dim so I gave the young one five more years just for the hell of it. That made her late twentyish.

"Preacher this is Selma and Tommie, ladies this is the preacher I told you about."

"Uncle Deacon nobody has called me preacher since I got home. I wish you would stop it." The women laughed.

"Especially when meeting two women," she smiled at me knowingly. She was also the older of the women. Since it was a table nobody was paired up. I spent most of the time engaging the younger woman in conversation. That is until Deacon realized that I had things a bit wrong.

The women had gone to the ladies room in a pack, as women mostly did in those days. "David, Tommie is my lady friend. Selma is her aunt. I thought you might enjoy a real conversation for a change. So be nice and pay her some attention."

I tried to look as thought I wasn't dumbfounded. I nodded. It was the best I could do. I made a plan then to have the steak and a beer with them then split. Funny thing though I got sidetracked. Deacon started telling his tales and singing his song, even more amazing Selma matched him story for story. They talked about WWII. Deacon told his OSS stories and Selma told her Pacific war nurse stories. She had been Twenty one in 1943 so I calculated her age to be 46 or 47. She seemed way to old for me, but the more I listened to she and Uncle Deacon talk, the younger she got.

The lights were low enough so that when I danced with her the only tip to her age was the softness of her breasts. I found out that she was married and I tensed. In 1967 it seemed wrong to be dancing with a married woman. Then I learned her husband was in a nursing home, early alzheimer she said. We danced and drank Uncle Deacon's liquor till almost midnight. I hadn't noticed that the two women drank almost nothing, while the Deacon and I got plastered.

At midnight we staggered to the parking lot. Tommie drove the Deacon's car and Selma drove my old Toyota. Well not too old since they hadn't been coming into the country that long. I was still staying with my mom and dad while I tried to save some money, so Selma drove me to her house. She parked my toyota on the grass behind the house. I didn't realize at the time that it was hide it from nosey neighbors.

Truth is I worked all that out postmortem. I wasn't coming down but still going up from all the booze. If I could have thought, I would have known that I had to start down soon. It would be a slow return to normalcy.