a very special love

She who shall not be named (SWSNBN) was a rich girl. She should've had nothing to do with me. I should have known better than to try for her.

But people don't always act on what they know better than, do they?

I was working in a skilled group of engineers in a good-sized corporation on the outskirts of Denver. How outskirt? Beyond us there were farms, woods, country roads, wildflowers, abandoned houses, and even abandoned pickups. Remember, this was long ago and far away in a country approaching its bi-centennial. People did things like that then, walk away from a pickup and never go back for it, move out of a house and just leave it. Unthinkable today, I think. But I digress. Engineers in a corporation on the edge of Denver. Our boss brought in a very pretty, impossibly young yet poised girl-woman, introduced her to us, then told me she would be working with me to learn how to program computers.

Funny how fate works.

I think I blushed. I would've been happy to teach her any damn thing she wanted. But seriously, if my boss said teach her programming, that's what I would do.

Well, crimeney. She didn't know a computer from an asteroid, and only barely knew programming from a college course. We started from scratch.

It should have been hopeless, but she was very bright.

I wrangled us a visit to see the computer and explained as well as I could all the busy-ness going on around it. Then we got out of people's way.

Geeminey! Knowing better, I still fell hoplee=ssly for her. She was tall and slender and well curved, and showed off her wonderful legs by wearing mini skirts and mini dresses. One day she saw me sitting with the fingers of my left hand squeezed between the top of my main drawer and my desk.

"What are you doing?" she accused.

"Keeping my mind off you," I explained.

"Well, stop it. You needn't."

Oh. I didn't know what to do, but tried several things. Nothing overt in the office. But we went for longish walks at lunch, then rides on my motorcycle, then rides into the hills behind the facility. On one of the latter, I stopped and we dismounted. We stood, looking at each other, then we kissed.

After that, every ride had a kissing session.

Then summer ended, and so did her internship.

"Don't you dare let this end us!" she told me. She gave me her phone number but it wouldn't work until Monday.

On Monday I called her. She gave me her address and told me she hoped she'd see me soon.

"This evening?" I teased, never expecting a yes.

"That would do," she said.

Crimeney! She was in Boulder, forty miles beyond my home in Golden. I called home and made some excuse and rode to Boulder after work.

More kisses. More touching. She told me she'd made sure her former boyfriend knew he was former.

For months we got together whenever we could, two or three times a week. At her room in a boarding house, at a cabin my friend, Scott, owned in the mountains west of Boulder, once even at my house when my wife and kids had gone to visit her folks.

For various reasons, my wife and I separated. As if some fate were at work, my employer sent me to Los Angeles temporarily. I've been here since.

SWSNBN and I got together in Portland and spent a long weekend touristing in Oregon. I visited her in Boulder whenever I could.

I think we lasted two years. Two and a half if you count that first six months in Colorado.

Oh man! Oh man! I wanted it to go on forever. I ignored that she was completely out of my class, and not just financially. Crimeney! She had gone to a boarding school for girls before she started college! Any fool should have known it couldn't last!

Not me! I believed what I wanted, and I wanted her.

And one evening she called and told me, "I'm going to break your heart." And she did. She had met a young man from her own class and fallen hopelessly in love with him. They married and still are.

Me? I persevered. I survived. I dated other women, but they kept being not her.

I was a mess.

Until I met Linda. That was at least four years later, maybe five.

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