I saw this face for the first time in a Kansas field, in 1976:
“The summer following my freshman year, I was at a church camp in Wichita, Kansas, and was walking alone, crossing a field. I spotted someone coming in my direction, also alone. As this person got closer, I could see he was in fact what I would call a stone-cold fox. As in babe. As in Holy crap, you’re cute. As he got closer, and our eyes locked, his pace quickened. Surely this meant something good.
He did not stop; he did not smile; he did not say anything at all. His apparent state of underwhelm starkly contrasted with my instantaneous, besotted rapture. Still, I was a goner.
Other boys came and went in my dating life, but there was no one I did not compare to my chance encounter on that Kansas field with this new Captain Fantastic. I got to know his family through the years, and I flirted. Hard. He even flirted back, but he never took it to the next level, and since I still had that shy, quiet voice, that was that. And my unrequited crush remained.
Six years after Kansas, something changed: he saw me. He saw that I truly existed, and that I had been right in front of him all along.
–excerpt from a chapter entitled, “Crush,” from my upcoming book.
And then the winter’s solstice 1983 came along, with the crashing Pacific waves illuminated foamy white by the moonlight, my stone-cold fox got down on one knee in the Newport Beach sand, pulled a gold band solitaire from his jean’s pocket and asked if I’d be his wife. I knew that answer back in that Kansas field.
Happy requited love to my Captain Fantastic.