Looking back over the years since getting dumped on this planet I find it hard to picture life..without you. Oh there was lots of girls I fell in love with, sure, but they didn’t fall in love with me; not for keeps, anyway, I was scared! so what. I recall when I was three there was these two nurses taking care of me in the hospital after my surgery, to remove something from my shoulder-bone that didn’t belong there (I still have the scar) and they hugged me a lot and fussed over me and brought me my meals and medicines around the clock (maybe they were using me for practice for when they might have their own baby boy); but then after about a week of that the doctor said I was okay and they took me home, my parents did..and it was over. Then there was this mature young woman who wanted me, enough to be stalking me at MACY’S near the toy department around Christmastime in Frisco, where we had paused in our travels for a brief layover; but my father foiled her plan. At first, he pretended not to notice her as she got closer and closer and would have actually kidnapped me, but Dad whisked me away at the last moment, “Nyahh! nyahh!” she was so mad at him she could’ve knifed him. Then we went back to our room at the hotel in the ‘Tenderloin’ area and I played with my brand new Mattel six-shooter rifle I made them buy me at the store until I got us all in trouble with management over the GREENIE stick-em caps I was popping away at with it, it had reached the tipping point (we checked out next day, early, and went to the parking garage and management waved us Good-bye! as we drove out to the street beneath the shadowy penumbra of tall, old buildings built on steep hills blocking the sun’s rays from getting in, and went somewhere for breakfast). And when I was 4 or five, before kindergarten I think, I had it really bad for the alcoholic dentist’s daughter, Jennifer, who lived high up on the hill behind us in a very old house of stone and mortar, on several acres with horses, that had an arched entry door made out of rough lumber like the old witch’s place in the woods that Hansel and Gretel got to visit..probably. And she would come see me, occasionally, and hold me in her lap sitting on the poured concrete steps going up to our house by the gas-meter on her pleated skirt and she was really sweet and blonde and slender; but then soon she got married, and once again I was out in the cold. My dad, the Preacher, performed the wedding ceremony in the church, next-door to our house with the leaky roof, and pots and pans to catch the drips; as I witnessed the whole thing from desperate shadows up in the balcony with a stained-glass window of Jesus tenderly holding a little lamb..and was heart-broken. After that, Dad gave me a Japanese rifle he brought home after the war which came with a bayonet that slipped on and locked over the barrel end and he showed me how to work the bolt action so it didn’t get jammed in the process and that helped to get over it a little, I guess..anyway, it was a seven-point-something millimeter and there was no bullets. In the second grade, for me, it was kind of a toss-up between Natalie, who I’d seen around in pre-school and who, now, a couple years later, I shared a desk with, or actually, it was a table in the third row; and then there was Leslie, who lived in a trailer at the “Polynesian” trailer-park out by the edge of town with her family which were Hungarians and she had long thick brown hair (there was a neon sign out front on the main drag that was lit-up at night, flashing the name of the place, giving it a bit of a South Seas feel surrounded by mountains, there, just north of San Fernando). She used to chase me up the ancient concrete drive-way that went to the church parking lot that abutted the dentist’s field where the mostly ignored horses meandered around after school in her pretty plaid dress with shoulder-straps that was blue and green and a white blouse underneath but I would always outrun her until finally she gave up and nothing much happened after that, –Ohh! I could have kicked myself!! until the third grade when something happened, it wasn’t much but it was something, –I’ll skip it..anyway, that’s all the women in my life until Jr.-Hi and there wasn’t anyone there, as far as I remember; oh! but except in the house next to ours, built on several lots, there was a young lady of Dutch descent maybe in her early twenties and blond named Bonnie Dykstra, who lived with her old dad in, I think it was a two-story house and she sported white go-go boots, sometimes, and drove around in a Mustang. And nothing happened there. And after that I don’t remember much, until, following a lot of lonely and desperate years in and out of schools, getting kicked off jobs up and down the coast; and not much else..there was you! soon to be my significant other, who, by a major miracle I met; and where we met it was a METS game, not really! just kidding, and it was true love and we were JUST MARRIED on the spot by my dear old Dad, the Preacher, who officiated tying the knot of holy matrimony for us in the Fairmont Park in Riverside..by that cute little lake, where we said our ‘I-do’s’ and forsaking all,ALL! others and “till death do us part”, heedless, in the moment, of how fast time flies..like driving a Pinto down a mountain that has lost its brakes; so you have to jam it in second, then first. And that’s that, thee END (but our love goes on and on, Honey, and, oh! by the way, Happy Valentine’s Day, my dearest one)