I have a new girlfriend

Yup. Marie.

She still lives 1100 miles away. But maybe I shouldn't have taken her quite at her word when she expressed all the strong reasons she didn't want a new romantic partner.

Not sure when we will get a chance to see each other. She's going to call me Wednesday evening, which will be the first time we have heard each other's voices since the early 1990's. This has all been by e-mail.

You remember back in December when she said she wanted nothing to do with me, but I could write if I wanted to? At the time I characterized that slim permission as "a glimmer of hope." Probably I should have characterized it as winning. The only thing she would allow me to do was write? Skin me alive, boil me in oil, but whatever you do don't throw me in that briar patch .... 

I shouldn't gloat. But it has been a couple of years since Debbie left. Maybe it's time to find out if I have learned how to handle romances a little better and with fewer bad habits.

It's also true that there is something intoxicating about the challenge of seduction. Wish I were a little younger so that I felt more desperate urgency about the sex at the end of it all. But it will be great to see Marie again, to be friends with her again ... and maybe to handle bed a little better than I did before.