JUST YOU AND ME AND THE RIVER FRIO

As I walked along the halls of work, a man came out of a room. He was my "Spanish tutor" these days, and he asked me how I was doing in spanish. The day before, he had asked me the same question, then repeated it in a second tone of voice, and added, mi amore, to which I laughed, "Mi amore? Nooo..."
Today, when he asked me, I exchanged with him what my plans were, and he tells me of his. I showed him my tires I was hanging and he said it reminded him of tubing down the river.
"You like the Frio River?" he asks, and I affirm.
"Let's go. Just you and me and the River Frio."
He sings a song of drifting along, bottle in the hand, tells me his favorite liquor, asks me mine. I am not sure I remember what mine is, plus I really have to do my task now. Along the way, I think about this little dream of his.
This man, he is much older than me. In fact, he has a son that works with us as well who is the same age as me (and quite the hunk). I had asked him of his wife, and he tells me of being married 35 years. He tells me the problem with marriage is this: that sometimes one of the peoples likes another person, but they cannot go with the other person because there are two of you, married. Both peoples need to agree. Sometimes the person says they love the other one so much that they will not allow the other people to go to someone else.
I love it that he tells me this. It kind of cracks me up because it is such a guy thing. Sometimes I think if guys had their way, they'd still be out there scamming if women didn't rein them in. To me, I find that monogamy is much easier for women.
I also understand what it is like to love more than one person. I think I lived like that a lot. I could straddle that fence better than anyone back in my day. It's not my day anymore, and his days are passing him by, too. I think of his plan to take me dancing sometime, and that's fine, I would like to cut a rug and he might do as a dancing partner. Of course, he knows that him and I on a river fine is nothing but the fantasy of an old man drifting along as life is passing by.
Every now and then we would like to catch our past as it swims by us and see its gills sparkle in the sun before we toss it back. The unfortunate truth of youth is that it fades, and so does opportunity. I thought for a moment that maybe if I was still young and free, I might take him up on that idea. I might dance with him until night time stars twinkled a warning, and drank until I was thirsty again. I might wink back at him and share that bottle.
Then again, maybe I wouldn't. In my prime, I might have walked right past him with my eyes wide open and never have noticed him. In fact, when we talk about the Frio River, I think it is possible I have. His idea of a good time is being surrounded by family, grilling fajitas and drinking a cool one and enjoying the cool, shallow waters of the river. He favors a wading spot in the Frio River outside the perimeter of Garner State Park. I might even have seen his family there before, as I walked by with my two sons on a camping adventure once. I stopped with the younger one to take this picture as a family much like ole Francisco's surrounded me. The idea that we cross paths with strangers before we ever met is such a wild one to me. This world is so small, and yet so mind-boggling huge.
At any rate, when he smiles at me and tells me, "this color looks good on you, very pretty...for a pretty girl", it makes me smile, and feel a bit like the girl I used to be. I remember that attraction and a good time used to be enough. I am much more practical now. These days, it is not. I am so much more complicated, or maybe just have a better sense of what I need. The list gets longer the older I get.
It's nice, though, to look back and think about how fun that used to be, when caring wasn't worth caring about. Dangling your hands in the waters and wondering what you might catch, just you and me down on the River Frio.

TYPED

She shakes her head and looks at me.
"I still can't believe that. I just can't imagine it," she says.
We are standing outside on the wooden balcony patio of a club where we have come to see my first lover perform. I am talking to an old friend, someone I knew in my teenage years and probably haven't seen in over fifteen years.
"I just would never imagine that you would have married a soldier. That doesn't seem like your type at all."
"Why?" I ask her all the while thinking, I had a "type"? I ask for elaboration. "Because I was all 'peace, love, and -fff'-?" I make a sound of an inhale while holding my fingers up to my mouth, as if I was smoking a joint.
"Yeah, because of the peace, love, and fff..." she says, also bringing her hand up to her mouth as if she is smoking some herb, and laughing at me. Suddenly the years catch up with me, and I remember the girl she must be remembering, the one in long boot cut jeans and funky necklaces, hanging out with the long haired boys with a roach clip in my pocket, a Kerouac book in my hand, and The Beatles playing on a cassette tape in the car.
The funny thing is I don't feel like I have changed at all. I myself have been caught up in the dilemma of being married to someone who supports something I completely oppose. I would nonviolently protest his deployments but no one seemed to notice. I would stick a flower in the muzzle of his gun, if he was allowed to bring it home.
I don't support the war, but the war supports me, I used to quip while anxiously awaiting his letters home. Or, I don't support the war, but I support my soldier, while filling care packages to go overseas to an APO for sorting before being delivered to a base in the desert.
I never meant to marry into the military, and I tell her a story about how my college boyfriend was headed to the military until we got serious, and I told him how adamant I was that I would not be a military wife. He decided to go in another direction instead, and eventually I ended up breaking his heart anyway, to marry this man, this man who was NOT going to be a soldier but still had a contract for a few years with the National Guard. Then poof, 9/11 happened, and that which never happened before started happening - they started sending the National Guard, our "weekend warriors", overseas to fight the war on terrorism. Suddenly three of the ten years we have been married has been spent apart while he fights, something I don't believe in, for our "freedom".
At any rate, I am wondering what "type" of person she would have imagined me with. Would he have long hair and some kind of eclectic profession, some sensitive pony-tailed guitar player? I run through my top five loves in my head again, trying to determine if I had a "type".
Meanwhile we are there to watch one of those five perform with his band onstage. I was struck by something while watching him that I never noticed before, in all these years of rememberance of years past. There was something remiscent in his jaw structure, in his mannerism, his profile...Oh. I never noticed before how very much he looks like my college boyfriend. He makes a face a couple times on stage that was exactly like one R used to make to me sometimes. And I realize that maybe, just maybe, I had some kind of type there, some physical characteristics I was looking for without even realizing it.
Maybe it is a little unfair to lump them together. After all, their life circumstances and professional interests are completely different...
But for a moment there, watching him center stage, I think...maybe I did have a type after all.

FIRM

I have this friend who keeps telling me I should change my religion.

This all started because he had this idea I should have a "sancho".

Probably, it all started when he was the friendliest person in the group of guys I work with. Right off the bat, he played getting-to-know-you games. He became a person I could trust with my work secrets. We commiserated about my boss and he told me histories, tales of morale, workman's complaints. Can't get no respect.

He told me stories of home. I told him stories of home. We talked of making plans. I talked to his wife on the phone about maybe hanging out some day. He told me a story about his past, other baby mama, how he was a dog, and his wife a saint. Her capability to forgive superceeds mine. I told him about some of my issues. He probably knew more than he should.

At any rate, about a year ago, he finished all our talks with, "You know what you need. You need a sancho." For those unfamiliar with this spanglish term, it means, "one who takes care of your wife while you're away". At some point, he began suggesting the sancho be him.

I tell him I can't have a sancho. When he questions why, I tell him this:

"I have a relationship with God. To have an affair with someone is incompatible with this relationship."

"Whaddya mean?"

"It's against my religion"

"Well, then change your religion"

I consider this. Not forsaking my God, but this idea that if the rules don't fit, you can just chuck them out the window. To me, God's love for us parallels the love parents have for their children. Just because it is unconditional does not mean nothing is asked of us. The conditions by which one abides when they want to stay in a relationship with God are not unlike a teenager coming home by curfew, because their parent asks for it. I could not reconcile an affair with my faith, and my faith will come first.

Lately he has started ending our talks with "Have you changed your religion yet? Well, when you do, come let me know."

I think he is being silly. I think that maybe he is trying to make me feel better, or just trying to be a flirt.

The other day, he shows me scratches across his face. "See this?", he says, and tells me a story about his wife getting mad at him, how she caught him taking a phone number from a girl who he was flirting with at a party. Once a dog, always a dog....

He points to a wound on my face. "See, we're in the same boat."

But we aren't. My wound happened because my dumb ass forgot a curtain rod was in the closet when I went through it for something, and it fell and busted my face. Coincidentally, my husband and I had a terrible fight the week before, so he makes assumptions.

He tells me he could make me feel like a teenager again. I tell him I would hope I am more mature than that.

I almost tell him about my theory of intention and right doing, but he doesn't get what I am saying, so I leave it alone.

I think of my friend Kerri, though. She was a best friend for a time in another state, and slowly we began the husband-bitching sessions that women get into. She took it to a new level, though. Eyes brimming with excitement, she told me how she discovered having an affair was the answer to her marriage. "It makes it so much better!" she says. I doubt it, and not long after, her husband makes her mad enough to throw it in his face during a fight. He divorced her, and she acted like that was what she wanted all along.

A year later, she was crying over the computer to me about how much she missed him, and how he broke her heart. I point out that she did cheat on him, quite willingly and with abandon. "I only did it because I loved him and he was breaking my heart!"

That is no excuse. Well, it is an excuse, but only one. It was a lesson in "decide what you want, and pursue it with intention." If she really wanted his love and attention, would giving hers to someone else fix it?

Today, my friend nearly choked to death on a dust bunny. He was violently coughing and had gone to spray water down his throat in an attempt to dislodge it. He was retching in a room and I sent his friend in to check on him.

A few minutes later, he comes, butt hurt because I didn't save him from dying, that I wasn't rushing to do CPR on him. I mention I sent his friend in....

"But I didn't want him to do mouth to mouth, I wanted you."

Then he tells me, "God is getting me, " grins, says it differently,

"I think Jesus is getting even with us."

"Not us, you," I say, pushing him out the door with a smile.

"I told you, I'm not changing my religion."

ROLL WITH THE CHANGES

Walking back to my car, I see the side profile of the man parked in the car next to me and think to myself, oh, he's a hottie. Then he gets out, and I sneak a look over my shoulder, and realize...it's a teenage boy.
Eww! Now I am totally grossed out. Teenage boys have no appeal for me, which is good, really, being as that I am a middle-aged woman (aren't I now? I find that I am referring to myself as such now, and it feels really weird. When do we become middle-aged anyway these days? Since I am approaching the age that Christ was when he was crucified, I feel really I should abandon any notions that I am still a "young woman").
Anyway, I am watching him walk into the store and trying to remember what it is I used to find so attractive about teenage boys when I was their age. Once I hit puberty, I was about as boy-crazy as they come. My junior high journal has a new male name doodled in it for every week, and my daily entries are all about boys, so-n-so is so fine, etc. They were all fine, which seems now like such a lame way to say someone is attractive.
Watching this guy here, the first thing I noticed was that his face was still catching up to him. Razor stubble, like he was attempting to shave with no real need, acne, just this oily unevenness and social awkwardness, was my first tip. His body had no real substance to it, just a light mess of musculature and bone. Then there was that ass, and that is what had me shaking my head and wondering what in the world was I thinking, half a lifetime ago.
I remember one night at scout camp (I know, you guys - my friends - here it comes, a camp story - I know you all think it is really funny to make fun of me for being the "one time at scout camp" girl, like the band camp girl on American Pie, but if you just spent one summer, just one, at one of these places, you could understand how three entire summers, plus change, could make such impressions on me), how my tent-mate and I were sitting outside on a muggy night, talking about boys. She asks me what kind of an ass do I think looks best on a guy, what's my favorite ass-type. I think for a little while, and then my boyfriend of a million years saunters by, same ass he's had since high school, since being a teenage boy, and I point and say, "that one". Oh sure, he was six foot tall and maybe a buck thirty soaking wet, but I still liked the way his ass didn't fill his jeans, how it left that little gap at the bottom.
The bottom-gap, dead give away to teeenage boy butt. This guy I am watching at the neighborhood Citgo has the bottom-gap, and I am remembering this conversation, and how she looked at me with surprise. She was older than me, maybe twenty three to my twenty, and maybe she had already gone through the transformation, when we as women stop lusting after boys and start wanting to make it with real men.
I don't know really when it happened with me. It's not like I just woke up one day and said, "Hey, now I like em with a little more meat on their bones". There was just a time I remember thinking teenage boys were fine, and there is now, where I wonder how I ever felt that way. Now they seem scrawny and a little unsure, and I am sure I would never want that anymore. Which is a good thing, since they are illegal anyway. Just know you will never see my face on the news arrested for indecency with a minor.
But I wonder how that happens, and why. I am not sure from a biological perspective why it would makes sense for women to change their taste as they age. Although grown men seem more virile than those boys, from the number of teenage pregnancies out in the world, it is probably not true physiologically. I am curious, though, about the process itself. When and how do we, as women, start preferring bigger dudes?
I have heard it true that people's taste buds change over time, and from observed experience, it is true that our food preferences do change over time to reflect that. That probably has some basis in nature but I am not sure exactly what it is. From an evolutionary standpoint, I think it probably increases our biological fitness to have these taste changes occur. Age differences and sexual preferences, to me, have more to do with cultural standards than actual biological fitness.
From my individual perspective, I know the change was not sudden. At some point, I just noticed that my eye was much more drawn to men who were thicker, stronger, more well developed, and who filled out their jeans to a larger extent. I started preferring intense passion and sexual proficiency, more than the sweet fumblings of inexperienced boys. Even though I can say on one hand that the failure of my long term relationship with my high school sweetheart had much to do with his accident (see post entitled "Washers"), I cannot deny that my preference changes had almost just as much to do with it, and my love for him wasn't enough to transcend my desire for larger, more powerful, more intense men. It couldn't transcend the change in my tastes. Blame it on the changes, the distance, or his issues, I couldn't stop cheating on him and eventually was drawn to an older, larger man who was able to meet my sexual preferences and provide for my emotional needs as well.
However, there were incompatible belief systems, which is why when I moved away from him and met a man who had the same values and life beliefs plus the physical build and intensity I had begun to prefer, I just had to marry him. I am much more capable of monogamy with this type of physicality.
Thoe boy turned to walk through the doors, and I saw that it was his profile that first had attracted me, and someday, when he grew into those jeans and his face caught up with him, he was going to be a very attractive man. Girls will probably be falling all over him.
Then I took my middle aged self back home to my fajita grilling big ole dude and our two littler dudes, wondering about girls and boys, and how we get from there to here.