This is how this story begins:

I was a newish graduate student at a fine university in Southern California. Not the one with the good football team. The one with the good basketball team. I was helping a woman with her senior thesis. I met her through the lesbian rap group on campus. I encouraged her to present her senior thesis at a regional conference I was also going to attend. Academics present papers at conferences. It’s a thing. And this woman thought she might want to go to graduate school.

I rode up to the conference with this woman and her girlfriend. I was a little intimidated by her girlfriend. She was sexy, had a shaved head, and rode a motorcycle. The girlfriend had a two door SUV and I, as the non couple person, rode in the back on the way to Davis, where the conference was to be held. On the way up, I bought a small packet of bite-sized Pecan Sandies. I dropped one and stepped on it. I didn’t mean to. When the girlfriend saw this, she teased me. I thought she was mad. She wasn’t.

This is part of the story too:

The senior thesis woman broke up with her girlfriend. The (now ex) girlfriend stopped by and left a note on my office door. Later that summer she gave me a large lemon that looked like a breast.

It looked more like a breast than that one does.  I loved that lemon because I loved the woman who gave it to me.  I didn’t know that when she gave me the lemon.  I suspected, but I didn’t know.

Later on this becomes part of the story:

The (now ex) girlfriend becomes my girlfriend. Because she knows I can, she often asks as we go to sleep at night, “will you tell me a story?” And I do tell her stories until she falls asleep.

Sometimes, when I say something innocuous (because I talk too much and say too much), she says to me, “that wasn’t a very good story.” She’s right, when she says that. Not all stories can be good, but I should try harder to give her good stories.

So here’s another piece of the story:

My honey starts a new chapter of her story today.

Here’s the last part of the story for today:

When the former graduate student, now sometimes professor, often administrator woke up this morning, she saw her love asleep.  She made up a stupid song that she sang to her love in celebration of 40 years of life.  It was a silly song, that got sort of squeaky at the end.  She thought it was ok, though, because sometimes the story is about breast lemons and squeaky songs.

_________

So, happy birthday, sweeties.  I can’t wait to see how your story moves on from here.

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