Silly Love Songs...

"There is no remedy to love…
but to love more."
- Henry David Thoreau

By Patrick Alcatraz

Editor

FORT WORTH, Texas - I would pull into her driveway deep in that neighborhood off Arlington Heights High School along the city's western end of I-30, and, at hearing my truck pull-in, Janet would push the garage opener thingee on her living room wall and the garage door would rise slowly, to let me in. In many ways, that was the perfect metaphor for our romance that year when I moved awfully through a divorce I never wanted. Janet was a schoolteacher friend of my then-wife Narda, a healthy-looking woman in her own right, a woman I would wine & dine and, yeah, that, too.

Love is a wickedly lovely part of the human experience. It treats you and it whips you, the end result always either something beautiful or something best kept at bay. Bad love, Kris Kristofferson once sang, is better than no love at all. Who knows about that? In my case, bad love has been rare - even in those involvements where things faded to black in a hurry. In the case of Janet, a Greek woman who loved to laugh, well, our time was one of those fast-framed epics where the adventure served as a fill-in to something breaking apart. She would cook for me, and she would bring the wine, and I would sit there at her dinner table, eating and sipping, and wondering what it was this woman would offer that my lovely wife no longer wanted to give me. For weeks, I loomed lost deep within a thick forest of the sort found in Eastern Europe, uncharted lands full of danger and without escape. But I slogged onward, meeting women like Janet, women I knew would be nothing more than fleeting moments of meaningless love, sex especially.

At times, on weekends mostly, we drifted out of town to check-out places we'd ignored in our earlier lives. Wine in Grapevine was fun. She would tell me while breakfasting on a Sunday morning at a plaza-front cafe in Granbury southwest of Fort Worth that she'd once seen me there with another woman, and I'd wonder who that other woman may have been. "I was there with my parents who were visiting and you sat over there with this woman who kept laughing aloud," she would say, noting that we'd first met a year or so earlier, when I'd joined my then-wife at a school function to do with the school district's Adult Ed. program. I loved that cafe. It served the sort of thick bacon I can never get enough of when ordering a breakfast of bacon & eggs & toast & coffee.

Anyway, Janet and I lasted through that winter, me sleeping over and jumping out of her big bed before dawn to go home ahead of my morning shower for work. She would walk me to the front door and give me a big, wet kiss that came with some sexual innuendo bullshit for later in the day. I did enjoy spooning with Janet, no doubt because of her nice, roundish ass.

I have no idea as to how love walks into a man's life, or how it decides to depart. I just know it happens, and I'm fine with that unexplainable celestial design.

Last night, a woman friend sort of complained to me that I never call her. Well, all I could say was that I'm not good at that stuff. My response did sound rather lame, and this time even I knew it. Do I need this emotional tumbling? I know I do. Do these women understand the ways of a guy my age? Sadly, they do not.

But I did call Laura earlier today. It was morning and she was in her kitchen, preparing breakfast. What I said was that the call would serve as my way of evening things in my ledger with her. She laughed and said, "You're so deep in the red with me that it'll take you a year to get back in the black." Then she laughed again, this time in a neat, friendly way.

Lord knows...I try....

- 30 -