Many, many years ago, when I was in my early 60s, a beautiful young man came to repair the computer at my office.

Turns out, he ended up repairing so much more.

My office at that time was in was a small house on the back of some commercial property.

There was no one around when I opened the door to see a six-foot-plus, golden brown, 20-something young man with dark brown eyes, a goatee and a a thick, black braid halfway down his back standing on the stoop.

“Did you call for a computer repair man?”

I certainly had.

I showed him to the computer and went to the other side of the room and there he was, all 200 muscular pounds of him sitting in my chair, filling my space with his man-ness, looking intently into the screen on my PC.

I noticed his shoulders, broad, the baseball cap on his head, backwards (yes, he had a baseball cap on), and his hands, big, gracefully working the keys.

I have to admit, I had a fantasy of those hands on my own keys.

“Can I ask you something?” I said quietly.

“Sure,” he said, after a moment. “I can do two things at once.”

“It’s a good thing,” I said. “Because I’d like to kiss you on the back of your neck?”

Turns out he loved to kiss—and he loved to talk.

He would come by afterwards just to talk.

“We don’t always have to be having sex” he’d say. Except he used the “F” word. And I’d say, “What’s wrong with always having sex?” Except I would use the “F” word.  And he’d say that he wanted to know the meaning of life.

And he meant it.

He was searching.

He was hungry for different views from those he’d gotten in that little yellow house on the south side.

He had a son. He wanted his son to know…more.

He’d call me up and ask if he could come over and “talk” and that’s what we would do—for a while—before we did that F word thing.

One Memorial Day weekend I had booked a room at a resort for a “Luxurious Retreat for Women” with facials and massages and pedicures and called a certain young computer repair man to come around after work each night.

“Don’t hurt me,” I’d said, suddenly aware that I’d arranged to have a man, more than half my age, join me in a hotel room in the foothills where nobody would know where I was or what had happened…and what could I have been thinking?

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I’m not like that. I respect you.”

And he did.

He loved to kiss (I think I said that—but my God did he love to kiss) and he loved to ask questions, and for what it was and for how long it was, he loved me too.

When I called him today, after almost 15 years, he called back within the hour.

Of course he remembered me.

He owned the business now, his son was in high school and he was happy for me that I was married.

It had been one day all those years ago that we talked about becoming aware of the “monkey mind” that meant the most to me. The day that he said, “See, what other woman could I talk to these things about?”

That was the day that he said that he really, honestly and truly and forever, never gave the fact that I was 40 years older than him a single thought other than that my skin was really soft and that, oh, yeah, I had a lot to offer him—a lot—and what did age matter anyway?

What mattered, he said, was connection and compatibility and feeling the same way about each other. That was what mattered.

I’ll never forget my man of the computer repair business with the backward baseball cap and the long, thick, black braid.

I’ll never forget my guy from the hood. The one who told me about what mattered and who, in doing so, offered me just as much as I ever offered him.

 

 

 

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Author: Carmelene Siani

Photo: Movie Still—The Graduate

Editor: Travis May