Before I started dating Dale I never noticed my shabby clothes. They were my workman’s pride. But with her on my arm my eyes were opened all of a sudden and my ragged clothes even made me feel shabby. So I wrote this sonnet on the subject but I never gave it to her, which I regret, as she inspired the thoughts and they belong to her:

If thoughts had weighty import on this Earth

And feelings spun the gold by which we live,

If finer thoughts stamped coins of greater worth

Then I would have a precious gift to give

To you, my love. My mind would swiftly spin

Fine silken threads and weave a luminous dress

That any princess would look pretty in.

And I would not be tardy to devise

Such other sweets as lovely women prize.

So rich in dreams, alas, in coin much less,

What fool am I to while away this time

In poverty, and ply a threadbare art

Of useless sighs all ribboned up in rhyme?

At least you’ll know the darling of my heart.

In one of the many strange twists of fate that seem to comprise my life, Dale returned to Berkeley two years later, in the late Fall of 85. She looked me up and found my condition (as far as money goes) radically altered. I had a beautifully furnished apartment in Piedmont, (an affluent area) and was away so much I asked her to stay there and watch it for me, for about six weeks. We resumed a sort of lukewarm affair.

So much had changed in our lives, we were almost on a status of ‘dear old friends’. But I was, with my money, able to redress my lack of it in the past and I did so with relish.

I had a sports car, a Datsun 240 Z and we took trips up the coast on sunny days and stayed at bed-and-breakfast rooms overnight. I took her to expensive restaurants and shopping malls, to the clothing departments, telling her she could have anything that struck her fancy. I even gave her money for watching my place, being away every other week, working four hours to the north.  All this because I still remembered the pangs of not having money when we first dated and when I wanted it so keenly.

But as for that first love, we knew it was over. In fact, it was while she was staying in my apartment and sleeping in my bed that I went away on a trip to Mexico and met and fell in love with my ex-wife, Sanita, the mother of my child.

Two years later she would appear again and live with my wife and me, strange trio, and our one-year old son in a huge house we rented in the empty hills of ‘Upper Lake’, three hours north of San Francisco, staying with us for over two months. But these stories are yet to come.

I'm sorry that I don't have any picture of Dale, though no picture could possibly do her justice without her musical voice and her aura of perfect composure when still and elegance when she moved, a true Grace Kelly.  My wife was the photographer in my life and took many pictures of our time on Upper Lake but took none of Dale while there, perhaps for a reason.  I kept no secrets, candid to a fault (as this autobiography proves) and Sanita knew every detail of my former passion for Dale and our adventures.  But here's a picture of us at the time:

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