May 6, 2008

Hey pretty girl,

Hopefully you're reading this a long time after the date above, why hopefully? Because this is a communiqué from the departed! Yep, I'm already scattered by now. Please don't be sorry.

So, why am I writing you?

For the last two years, I have been awakened by the sound of your voice several times a week. You don't say anything, just call my name.

It's been fifty years since those Sunday afternoons in my dad's car, but I remember those days like they were last weekend. I have been dreaming about you for the last year and a half. NO, these are not erotic or sex dreams; I reserve that time with you for my daydreams! Wow, in those you are incredibly naughty!

I wake hearing the sound of your voice calling my name and of course you are not here. I have been trying to rationalize the reason for these dreams and can only conclude that I need to tell you something while I still can, and this is the only way I can do it, I'm way up here in Missouri and you are still in our little East Texas hometown, and I understand married again, to Bobby P. I remember him, (he was a couple of years behind me in school), as being a really nice good-natured person who was liked by everyone. I hope that he is still that way and that you have had a good life together.

Well, I have procrastinated long enough. I need to tell you that I have loved three women in my life and have slept with 2 of them; you are the third, although, technically, you were a girl at the time. Now, it's easy for you to just tear this up and throw it away and no one will ever know about this but you. I have trusted my friend Rob to get this to you, privately, but he has no idea what's in it. The high point of my life back then was the time I spent watching you drive my dad's car, and yes, Anne was right, I was looking down the front of your dress and could not believe I was that lucky. I have never admitted that to anyone, although confronted by the two boys who rode with us, later that day.

They were in the back seat with Anne.

If this next idea is wrong, please remember that no one else has ever heard it, but years later, after I had an idea of who I really was and overcame my low self esteem problem, I realized, (or decided) that the day you dropped Anne, Bobby and John off somewhere and took me somewhere else and parked the car, turned toward me and leaned back against drivers door the you were giving me the chance to tell you how I felt, but I was too shy and lacking in self-worth. I recall you said something about how wonderful it would be to be parked somewhere and, " ... have my guy over here kissing me...", I can still see you sitting there in a white peasant blouse and all I could think of was "Wow, I wish that was me she wanted over there". Again, dear, no one else has ever heard this. Back then girls did not date down in class years, they dated up, but not down.

After high school and a semester of college, I laid out of college for a year and worked in Dallas. When I returned home, you were married and I was devastated, got drunk for 3 days. The next few years were hard, but I survived and fell in love with Lin.

When you became a widow, I had been married to Lin for several years and we were living, I think in Kansas City. We moved to St. Louis in 1968. Our marriage was good until 1982. It was then that she retreated from me, at first, emotionally and subsequently, physically moving to another bedroom except when I took her to my bed, which she seemed to still, enjoy. At a time when I was traveling from Monday morning until Friday night, she took a job at a hospital working from 7:00 AM to 4:30 PM on Saturday and Sunday, she had no time for me, with 2 teen aged boys still at home and needing her rest when she was not working. We did not need the small paycheck she brought home. We separated for a few months, but I was going by every morning I was in town, after the boys went to school, she couldn't seem to get enough, even doing things she had never done for me before — of course after I moved back home, she stopped, telling that " ... wives don't do that, only girl friends do that...". We stayed together for another 15 years during which she never trusted me, and than she withdrew again. This time was different; she did not want to be touched. I would call home and get no answer, the next night, she would tell me she was shopping the night before. Then one night, I called she told me that she had been shopping the night before and was going to bed early, but when I called home 2 hours later there was no answer. I always believed her. The second time she withdrew, I became suspicious. I had a good friend who was a police officer in our little town in St. Louis County. He was a sergeant, so some nights, he was the watch commander, I called him one night when she did not answer, he a parked in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of our street like he was running radar. She came home at 2::00 AM — next night told me she was shopping, so much for not trusting me!

But enough about her, I respect her for the home she made for our children. Also, my son told me that my daughter K. made a comment about me that Linda did not like and she told my daughter that instead of being angry at me, she should remember that many men today have just walked away from their families, but your dad stayed and provided a safe home, and all the necessities., and had co-signed for a car for K.

The first time she pulled away from me, I should have confronted her, but did not. Instead I began to listen to some of the offers that I was getting from the women in the towns I traveled. But I didn't do anything but listen until I was at a bar in a Holiday Inn with an auto dealer client and I met Layne, she was from Kansas and she did not make me an offer, but after Beth, the friend she was visiting wanted to leave early with her boy friend, Beth asked if I would give Layne a ride home to her house later. She was taking her boy friend home for 2-3 hours before he left town, I think he was a truck driver. We spent a couple of hours together and decided to get a sandwich, away from the smoke and bar noise and then I took her home, as I stopped at the house, she pushed away from the door, toward me, turned and kissed me, leaned back and told me that she didn't intend to do that and " ... didn't do that kind of thing on the first date..." and laughed when I asked her if this was a date, because my wife would not like that, then she apologized. I laughed and told her I enjoyed it, I had not kissed any one except my wife since 1962, but the trouble with kisses is they don't stay with you, you immediately want another, and I took several more before I let her go in, and so it went. There was a recent popular country song where the singer laments he didn't know what he was thinking, but he knew what he as feeling. I definitely was not thinking with my head, at least not the big head. We made a date for the next night; I had to rearrange my work schedule for the rest of the week. The next night, we had dinner and danced for a while and during a slow dance she said, "It's time to go". I drove straight to my motel and that was it, bells, stars, whistles — all, the corny clichés! We fit together, sorry, that sounds wrong (too suggestive), what I mean is we clicked, finishing each other's sentences, etc. the sex was wonderful, the best I had ever had.