She was a sweet, very shy, freckled, true strawberry blonde I'd met in high school when I was a freshman. I've loved and been loved by several women, mostly good ones. Special ones became friends after the heat of lust. The memories and their blessings are treasured as priceless affirmations. But I've toted that torch for my first love, Helen, since I was thirteen. Its warmth and illumination are apparent in dreams often, day and night ones.

I have never seen another combination like her special look and smile. That look claimed me in an old, tobacco-sale barn when we worked on a high school homecoming float over forty years ago. Our connecting in that experience was forged by our mutual awareness that we really worked hard on the project while most of our classmates practiced adolescent pre-mating customs. She noticed and appreciated my efforts and I hers. But I was smitten and aspired to indulge in my classmates' carrying-on. After a couple years of my devotion and striving I despaired of our great romance ever materializing. We never had a date. So I went on fumbling through that curse with others.

The woman I love and who loves me was waiting in South Mississippi during my Tom Wolfish mission. She has an understanding of my weirdness and obsession with this pilgrimage to work on the Jones biography. She even grudgingly tolerates my memories of a teenage super crush. Can there be a truer love? She has not tried to tame me and thus is most powerful. I guess she appreciates my silliness about a high school crush as an element of harmless, chronic, middle-age angst. When I'm dangerously realistic and honest with myself, I admit it is just that.

I drove the next morning the seven miles through London quality four-thirty a.m. fog to town. I tried to put some things in order as I automatically took the curves of Tennessee State Highway 110 from Mary's Grove through Kirkland and Skinem, down Well's Hill; blessed again by the breath taking beauty of Blankenship Hollow to the West, around a couple curves onto U.S. Highway 431.

Helen, my once hoped for teenage love, was happy in a far off city with a challenging career with her family. I had lived my often-melodramatic life and now was happily married in south Mississippi.

After three heart attacks in less than a year and six months of what the medical folk called a good recovery, I was in my Tennessee home country, bumming around and searching for something-I wasn't sure exactly what. But that morning I had an appointment with a ghost. That should provide some interesting possibilities. "More things under heaven," indeed!




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