A woman and I had gone to a small, second hand store about 15 kilometers west of South Shore, Kentucky, a store where I used to buy comic books as a boy. The store seemed rather bare inside. I wasn't looking for comic books, but for record albums. Just as I headed for the record albums, I saw another woman walk in, a woman whom I knew also collected record albums. I beat the woman to the albums and picked them up. There were only five or six, and none looked like anything in which I would be interested. The cover of one album showed the butt of a man wearing blue jeans. I thought the album was by Bruce Springsteen. I wasn't interested in it. However, just as I finally did find an album which interested me, the woman who had come with me called me over to her, where I saw another album similar to the one which interested me. However the price of the album was $49, far more than I wanted to pay.

I saw the man in charge of the store and asked him how much the first album I had found would cost. Then I saw the white price tag on the back which said $12.50. I didn't even want to pay that much and I finally put the album back.

When I finally sat down in a small section over to the side, I noticed several pictures on the wall, all of the woman with whom I had come to the store. It seemed strange because the woman was now only in her 30s, but the pictures were old, as if they had been taken in the 1920s. I concluded the woman must be friends with the people who owned the store, and that she had been coming here for a long time. Obviously the store owners had taken pictures of the woman and decorated this section with them.

***

Still at the same place, I was sitting at a table with several other women. One thin woman on my right had long, brown hair. Although she was rather rough-looking, the more I thought about it, the more I realized we had a lot in common. Even the fact that we had both come to this same store was evidence of that. I tried to find out how long she had been coming to the store and concluded that she had been coming here for around 35 years. I tried to remember when I had first come to the store. At first I thought it had been when I had been in the first grade, but then I realized I had first come when I had been in the sixth grade. But it still seemed as if I had been coming here for about 40 years, longer than the woman. At least I thought we had that much in common.

I wanted to go and eat breakfast with some others here, and I thought I would like for the woman to go with us. I thought I would have coffee with my breakfast, and I wondered if the woman also drank coffee. I wondered if we also had that in common. I looked at the woman and under my breath, so the others couldn't hear, I whispered, "Come on and go with us."

She indicated that she definitely wanted to go with us. I was glad. I had a strong feeling she and I were going to end up seeing a lot of each other. I felt strongly drawn to her.