Independent SWF ailurophile. No facepaint, no TV, no dead fish on my pizza. Assorted paper-related interests. Not seeking magic moments. No sex first year, blah blah blah...
"Ailurophile" was a test. Would a guy know what it meant? Or have a dictionary to look it up in? Or have enough curiosity to bother?
A most intriguing letter began, "The moment I read your ad, I got my dictionary out to look up ailurophile. [Already he'd passed!] Well, I couldn't find it anywhere, but I thought about it awhile and decided that it must mean an obsessive compulsion with ailments. Is this true?"
Having thus made me laugh in the first paragraph, he was already on pretty solid ground. The rest of the three neatly typewritten pages--on lovely grey textured stationery, by the way--was fabulous. And although I did not mention his stationery in my reply, he
did compliment me on mine in his next letter.
Remember when I mentioned the seductive effect of a well-written letter, and how women want to be wooed by language? Try this on for size, from his second letter, in a paragraph about his brother:
Trust isn't so easy to come by these days. It has to be nurtured like a garden or a tree, but eventually it yields a beautiful human emotional fruit if the motives are sound.
Be still, my beating, thumping, pounding heart! Wooed, indeed!
We exchanged several delicious letters over the course of a month. Interesting things came out. For example, I mentioned liking light formula mystery novels. He responded that he liked Lillian Jackson Braun's
The Cat Who... series--exactly the mysteries I'd meant. I sent him an article I'd clipped from the newspaper a year before, about "non-dating." He replied that he'd read the same article quite recently somewhere and felt the same way about it that I did. In one of his letters, he sent me a perfect red leaf.
Our correspondence was such a pleasure for both of us that it became more and more risky to put off meeting. What if we hated each other in person? We hadn't exchanged photographs. What if there was no physical attraction between us? So we arranged to meet at a sidewalk cafe in the city. We made no plans at all for how we would recognize each other. He'd told me in his first letter that he was 6' tall with brown hair and eyes. I must have told him as much about me, but that's all.
It was a sunny fall day. I wore black jeans and a black t-shirt with a small multicolored radio station logo on it. I was still almost half a block from the cafe when he got up from a table and came to meet me. He wore black jeans and a black tank top which left exposed the most brilliant tattoo art I've ever seen, beautifully colored animals and birds covering whatever was exposed of his lean body and strong arms.
We sat in the cafe for awhile, drank soda, became accustomed to each other's presence. The air was electric. Finally we left and went to a park where we could walk together. Eventually we laid in the grass on a hill and kissed. Afterward, when I got home, I saw that one of my feather earrings was gone. I liked thinking that he might have slipped it from my ear and taken it as a keepsake.
Our next letters crossed in the mail. He wrote that my hands were exciting. I wrote that I liked his long, wicked fingers. I found the structure of his face wonderful and interesting. He thought my face was beautiful. There was more, much more. Breathless parallel passion on both sides. We arranged to meet again at the same cafe.
What, you may wonder, of the "no sex first year" clause? Well, people, it was never written in stone, and was meant only to discourage the riff-raff and make clear that I was looking for a relationship with substance and duration. I would have happily issued a waiver when the time was right. I'm not saying the right time would have been our second date, only that the right time was a lot closer than eleven more months into the future. A lot.
Oddly, however, I was stood up for our second date. I have a ten-minute limit on tardiness when I feel it's habitual, but we had no precedent for that, so I waited almost an hour for him. He was using public transportation, after all, and so deserved the benefit of the doubt. Finally I went home. I expected a phone call, some kind of explanation, but none was forthcoming. I was mystified, but I let it go. The whole thing, I thought, had been too good to be true anyway.
Six months went by. One day I answered the phone and it was him. No real explanation was offered, nor requested. He wanted to arrange another meeting. I did too. It was arranged.
Even more oddly, he stood me up that time too.
I never heard from him again.
[Sigh...]
I'm told the window of opportunity for working with the scar is about three months. The purpose of massaging it is to reduce the development of scar tissue and get what's already there to unstick from the tendons it has attached to. My PT spends 5-10 minutes of every session working on it, and she wants me to do the same at home about six times a day. This week we've added another attempt to get it moving. I apply a strip of paper tape over it during the day, sticking it down well. As I go about my activities, there is a bit of pull and twist on the tape, and thus a bit of extra movement--massage, as it were--even when I'm not actively working on it. This evening, for the first time, I see that the area has finally begun to soften a bit, and I can feel one of the tendons under the surface. Around here, that's what we call progress!
