IV. ALL BECAUSE OF A FIRST LOVE

          High school days would have been perfect had I not fallen in love for the first time. She was a real beauty and I spent my whole day trying to catch a glimpse of her. We were schoolmates but boys were separated from girls, with the girls taking the morning session while boys hold class in the afternoon. Entering the school building was the most anticipated moment of the day since I got to see her close as they leave class while we come in. We held class at the fourth floor of the Education building so I usually loiter in the the hallway hoping to see her down the football field.

          Four years, I never had the guts to tell her how I feel. I didn't find my self attractive enough and with all the other boys hitting at her I thought I did not have a chance.  That's when I pretended to be a reader, always  holding a paperback novel each time she's near so I could watch her unnoticed. To make good my act, I buy books and Reader's Digest on a regularly. My only recourse then was turn her into literature, writing poems, keeping a scrapbook diary, and holding her in my dreams. Come from all those stupid things I did was my discovery of the make believe world books can bring as well as the knowledge that came with them.

         High school ended without me making the first move. I never did even found out where she studied thereafter but her image lingered forever in my dreams until I met her via Internet as our class of '76 created a website for a planned re-union.  In my dreams, she was always the teen-age lass with trim mestisa figures and a wonderful smile. But that's the problem with old flames, they too grow old. She still had that kind of smile but doubled in size. The web chat was fun, recalling those crazy, crazy days and at one she said I should have waited.  It was a phrase that I  have long  wanted to hear, but I knew there was no way of coming back. After the re-union, I went back to my old shell, alone with my family and my bookstore.

          Loving from a distance was something I was not able to overcome. College days ended the same, me falling in love with every pretty faces I met, but never having the guts to go beyond first base. The only good thing that came out of it were the accumulating number of scrapbooks that I got to keep. More girls, more love letters unsent, poems written but never  recited, and books read to at least keep them in my dreams. Things improved a bit in my working days, able to earn a good salary that I were able to practice some love lines with GROs we meet on night spots. Eight years, me and my friends did nothing but wining and whoring around.

          Then one day, I came to know a girl crazy enough to fall in love with someone like me. We got married a year later, I stopped writing for a while since I get to say whatever I have in my mind. No more dreams and imaginings, just plain living and learning about how wonderful the life we're living. I never thought  living a happy life was that simple - all you have to do is to do the things that you love, love everyone that needs to be love, and keep a distance from people who want to "fix" your life. Life truly is a bed of roses, but you must first remove the thorns before you lie in it.

          That's the perks of being a bookseller, you can choose what you wanted to be every day. you could be with Sherlock Holmes solving a murder, be a dashing Rhett Butler every woman loves, or swing like Tarzan, or travel in space with Asimov. You can be anything or anyone. In serious times, you learn things about the world and life and the universe, or even the things that trouble the mind and the hearts of men.  And most of all, you can be with people of your own kind, speaking the same language only readers could understand. And once the day is through, you can go back to what you really are, holding hands with the one you love, and free to dream whatever you want.