She isn’t a Luddite, but Paula didn’t start using email till 1998. She’d been a pen-and-ink type of writer (she used a fountain pen because she didn’t want to press hard, and she held the cap in her left hand when she wrote, in case there was any ink inside the cap that could smear the nib). But after she acquired her first word processing computer in 1980, she began typing so much that the 8th grade lessons flowered within her. For a clerk-typist who only managed 47 words a minute when she took her first job in 1975, Paula blossomed into a touch-typist who could work the machine faster than she could write.
When she finally got into email (Eudora program), she liked it. She sent greetings to the half dozen friends who were already into it, and everyone replied. Soon she was involved in a daily correspondence with her old acquaintance Don. He lived in Austin, she in Berkeley, and neither was much into the phone for personal interchange; email was an easy way to chat.
They’d met three years earlier. She doesn’t remember how he got her contact information, but Don was then selling oil&gas investments, and he’d been calling her with limited partnership opportunities, now and then. They both gave good phone (their mutual aversion to the medium was not based on lack of skill but on overuse during work hours), and they developed a conversational relationship that included news, amusement, a little flirting, and mutual respect.
There was humor between them from the first call, and chemistry soon after. Don is a tall handsome personable man. He has always liked women and flirted well, and he has succeeded with a variety of them. He was a little old for the summer-of-love (born in 1942, he can’t claim to be a boomer), but he was still associating with his old college buddies and living near campus till 28; he was active and into the era between free love and the advent of AIDs. In 1970 he made the cross-country pilgrimage to the left coast, traveling with four friends and hooking up with a dozen more in Berkeley. He peddled flowers and balloons, drove a cab, and fucked women (friends and fares), knocked one up and married her, sired a few more offspring on her and then had to move the wife and kids out of state, to make money and preserve the growing family. His wife was almost as bent as he – she tolerated and sometimes encouraged his sexual adventures, she managed to never earn money herself, and she changed her name to Rain, formally.
Paula was not like Don and, except for the fact that his taste was so broad, she wasn’t his type either. He found almost every woman lovely, but he was attracted to long blonde hair and long slim legs. Paula is about five and a half feet tall but tips the scales at 160 when she is “good.” She has dark hair that curls becomingly with the right products and humidity, but often frizzes out in the coastal air. Her legs are strong and too sturdy to be described as slim.
They met about a year after the first telephone calls, about a month after Paula finally agreed to invest in one of Don’s deals. He made a trip to the Bay Area, partly to see potential prospects like Paula but mostly to visit buddies from the good old days. Paula will never forget walking from her office to the reception area and getting a first look at him. He was taller than she expected, dark-haired, large-featured: very much her physical type. She felt a strong attraction. Their eyes met and it seemed he shared the feeling. She hadn’t then learned that any guy that good-looking and personable was easy with attraction.
They had lunch that day, before he flew back to Texas. That’s when she first heard his personal history. That’s when she learned that his marriage was pretty much over; he just didn’t have enough money to split up with Rain. He told Paula how each of them had a separate wing in the house where they raised their kids and still lived. He said they led separate lives.
