Robert Lubrican - For Want of a Memory

You need to know a couple of things about this story before you read it. First, it is written primarily for my editor, Peaches. The only coin of the relm in my kingdom is words, and I owe her lots of them. So this story is based on her fantasy.

I said it was written "primarily" for Peaches. Her fantasy is about a specific man who she hopes to meet and be able to be with. Just for the record, it’s not me. By the same token, she has been so kind as to allow ME to have my own fantasies, many of which are about her. The story "Read Dirty To Me" was one such fantasy, and she was very sweet about editing that. I am on her "men I like" list, which is probably why.

So, when it came time to probe her mind for the details of her fantasy, and I found out they’d pretty much fit in four pages of text, I asked her if I could "add a little" here and there, just to make it a little more interesting to the general reader … like you.

And then there were all those people who kept writing and telling me I should write something more mainstream … something that might actually make it past the censors.

So here it is. This is a mainstream story, about one woman’s fantasy. There’s no sex for 200 pages, according to Peaches (who was NOT happy about that, by the way) but, then, a decent plot requires a lot of things to happen that don’t involve sex.

What I’m saying is this is not a stroke story. It has a stroke story buried in it, but there is much much more. You’ll meet some very interesting characters, and confront some very interesting issues.

There are world shaking events that could happen to you, in a split second, with ramifications that could last a lifetime. This is a story of how something relatively small, in the grand scheme of things, rocked the worlds of a number of people, and let two of them to fall in love.

Bob

This is a story about how entirely different kinds of people, from completely disparate backgrounds, can be brought together in a dance of sorts that will have profound effects on all of their lives.

Normally, when we think of "people," we tend to think of those we are friends with or see at work. Maybe they’re in an organization we belong to or are part of our extended families. In any case, we usually think of them as being mostly like us.

We HEAR about other kinds of people-rich people, very poor people, victims of crime, lottery winners-the list goes on and on. But we don’t KNOW any of those people, by and large or, if we do, we know lots of them. We tend to gather those around us who we are most like, even if we think of them as being like us.

But sometimes, the paths of very different kinds of people cross. Fate plays a role in that, perhaps. You could call it luck-either good or bad, depending on the circumstances. In any case, when that happens, things get shaken up. Lives get shaken up.

And things change-sometimes drastically.

The first person you must meet is Kris. And it’s important that I tell you a lot about him, because you need to understand him, to understand the choices he made, which form the core of this story.

When the average person looked at Kris Farmingham, he … or she, for that matter … normally didn’t look twice. Just like the average person, Kris was … well … average.

At forty-seven years of age, he stood five-ten and weighed around one-sixty. His light brown hair was thinning on top and, rather than try to do the comb-over, he just kept it closely cropped all over. It was easier, even if he didn’t think it did much for his looks. His facial features were mixed. A smallish nose, with a straight bridge and rounded tip sat above full lips, though the bottom one looked larger than the top. When he smiled with those lips it was a tight smile, usually, as if he didn’t want people to see his teeth. That tight smile created dimples in his cheeks which, along with his twinkling chocolate brown eyes, sometimes gave him the appearance of being mischievous. He could look like trouble, but generally didn’t display that.

His tanned skin and, perhaps, the freckles on it (depending on what dermatologist you talked to) were the result of spending time in the Australian sun. That outdoorsy life was also responsible for the washboard stomach that most people didn’t know he had. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him, with the possible exception of enough skin to grip at the waist, though he currently had no significant other in his life to grip it. He had a girlfriend, named Lola, but didn’t consider her a "significant other" at this point. Living in Australia was also responsible for his accent, even though he hadn’t been born there.

His hands and feet were average sized and his voice, while pleasantly deep, wasn’t anything special either.

In short, he could blend into a crowd rather easily. This was to become important, though he’d never have thought blending in might be something to crave. As it turned out … it was, but we’ll get to that later.

While no one on the street would take a second look at him, people he passed on that street might very well know who he was if they heard one of the names he used. Kris was an author-a popular author at that.

Kris came to writing almost by accident. The son of a preacher man, he already had fire in his soul when a chance trip to a summer theater camp enabled him to express himself in ways he’d never been able to before. Eventually, his college education was put to use teaching music and theater. He traveled the world, for a variety of reasons, and became something of a proverbial renaissance man.

We are, say the philosophers, the sum of our existence-which is to say that what happens to us … what we experience in life … molds us into the people we become. That sounds like a lot of double talk to some, but the fact is that we don’t necessarily turn out to be who we WANT to be. In youth, we have dreams of what life will be like later on. We often view the future as something we can manipulate, if care is taken to cause things to happen. But the fact is, largely, that our past has more effect on our future than our mind does.

Kris' past had had a lot to do with him becoming an author.

His parents divorced, which caused his older sister to seek solace in the arms of a brand of religion far more conservative than the one she was raised in. Apparently that religion was a good hugger, because she hugged it for all she was worth. Some people, including Kris, sometimes, thought of her as a loony religious fanatic.

His mother had a tendency to lie about her age and there were step-siblings, which can work for or against one. He grew up in two families, in California, which was as forgiving of parents who didn’t know how to handle money, when they had some, as anyplace can be. He didn’t want for much, on a physical plane, even though the family purse was usually empty. Emotionally, though, he was hungry. As a result, football became his center of emotional fulfillment. He memorized the stats of every player that ever held a pigskin in his hands and played the game avidly until an Achilles tendon injury sidelined him. That also killed his dream of being a sports star, which gave way to different dreams that were the result of his discovery of drugs. A good dose of common sense saved him from that.

He suffered the same kinds of slings and arrows most people suffer. His father died. His relatives were all odd, in one way or another. He was plain enough, and shy enough, that girls weren’t all that interested in him. That is to say that while there was nothing wrong with him, most girls thought, perhaps unconsciously, that they could do better.

And so he dreamed. Dreams filled in the passion and excitement that real life wouldn’t supply, and those dreams were what later became the muse that helped him create the books that people would come to love and buy in large enough numbers to support him while he wrote fulltime.