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The story I am about to tell is not of love past, but of a love that never was. I am haunted by what I could not have and yet does exist, to this day, this very hour in fact, having just left him, a familiar and long comforting voice that has spoken to me for now 24 years, belonging to a man who watched me grow up, a man whose eyes haunt me, whose music sooths me and whose story I have told only in whispers.

I gave birth in winter to a beautiful boy - golden hair and tiny, precious and mine. But I was young, my marriage to his father five months off and our future was one big question mark. He was cranky. I was immature and easily frustrated by his sporadic nursing, the discomfort of it, the constant walking up and down the halls of our home, him on my shoulder, needing comfort myself, but him needing more.

We cried a lot, the two of us, together. His father loved us, did the best he could to help, but when nursing most of the intimate transfer of pain during times of distress falls upon the mother, and so this tiny new life and I forged a tender and fragile bond as we fought our way through a hard time for us both, one it seemed no one could help with, no one could share.

I loved music and used it to soothe us as we walked, everything from the radio to the lullabies I had heard from my own mother as a child and at times, they would help - both of us. One in particular, our favorite, was a song popular at the time and heard constantly on the radio. It was sung by one man but written by another. As it became our mantra, I decided to write to the man who penned the lyrics, to thank him for the gift of his music, this song in particular.

Two weeks later, on a Saturday, holding my red faced screaming infant, I tried to make out the voice on the other end of the phone. I almost dropped him when I realized who it was. Apparently touched by my letter, he looked me up by my return address and called to say thank you. His 'thanks' became a two hour conversation which neither of us was to know would lead to a friendship so deep, so right, that it lasts to this day. In respect for his privacy and in celebration of his talent, I think of him as "The Poet".

Our feelings of kinship, I guess you might call it, a kind of spiritual understanding of one another were immediate and profound, but for several years we avoided any kind of deep expression of feeling, tho he did visit once or twice, sent flowers on birthdays, cards during illness and tiny gifts to my son, which I always

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