The Third Place Experience

They’d say Karen knew her way around men, but actually she knew men’s ways around her. They would orbit her like moon-faced satellites. Occasionally one blazing-egoed, meteoric swain would try breaking through her sweet-pheromoned atmosphere only to burst into flame and barely make his way out as a mere cinder of his former astral glory. “Arrogant bitch,” they’d say. So they put out the word she was “experienced.” Someone so beautiful, so attractive, so well-put-together simply had to have been around the galaxy a time or two. But she hadn’t. She came from St. Johnsville and she had the FFA and 4H bona fides to prove it. I was her city boy fifth H, Honesty on top of the Head, Health, Hand and Heart. She never could understand why only jerks would try to strike up what seemed to them a conversation, but was to her a pubic service announcement. Why she told me this, I didn’t wish to know. I didn’t need to know anything more than every time she brought her whisper close to my ear I’d shiver in its warmth, stretch to colossus status among my peers and learn more about how women think than a cute (she said), funny, shy guy should. And yet, I never got the girl. One of those jerks, this one from Albany, with patience and lines as smooth and warm as Holstein juice straight from the source, wrested her from my scant gravity. We grew apart, as experience taught each our own lessons. Well, maybe just Karen. No, I take that back. I learned that while it’s always the best policy, honesty will only get you a healthy  yellow ribbon, maybe as high as an intellectually headed red. Oh, and warm, near-intimate experience earned is no guarantee of securing the blue ribbon prize of a particular celestial body’s hand or heart. Just the blues.

Another Experience/Inexperience piece. A free-write.