Wish I had a picture...

Boudica. My private name for my wife.
Doesn’t do her justice, but all I’ve got.

 ...but I don’t. So you’ll have to rely on my wordsmithing.

She was soooo beautiful. We were proofreaders at a nuclear engineering firm in the aftermath of Three Mile Island. They were paying us good money to fix all the ways the documentation had gone wrong. She was our Boss. Five foot nothing, a red lion’s mane, freckles from hell, and those pants she wore, what we didn’t know then to call a camel toe. Every damn day. That mane. Not a literary simile. A fucking mane. There were tits in there somewhere too. Jesus.

She was soooo domineering. And, yes, she was after me from Day One. Not even clever about it. We had to initial our proofread documents. RFL was my initial set. I started getting messages from the Boss addressed to ‘Rifleman.’ She ordered me to create a seminar about  ‘The Comma,’ Because she was tired of flame wars between proofies putting commas in and taking them out. Everybody knew. She was a decade older and she didn’t care. I was hers from Day One.

She was soooo sexual. When I was summoned to her office for the Comma Seminar, I could feel her burning across and through the desk.

I’m married to her now. I can say these things. I wrote and delivered the seminar. How things work out. It was the crystallizing event of my writing career. Swear to God. The first time — after Mercersburg, Harvard, and Cornell — that I finally understood sentence structure. Sentence structure. Set me free. That and the DECmate II I got on my desk after I got fired from Stone & Webster because that “crazy woman” and Debby DiBiasi were chasing after him during working hours. Proofreaders don’t have sex lives. Only engineers do...

She saw something in me. I saw something in her. I was afraid. She was, unfortunately, also afraid. Why it took us 20 years to find one another again.

A story for another day. Blogger style.