So, I grew up in Michigan, near the shores of the Great Lakes, where fierce winter winds whip down across the Great Canadian Steppe, pushing the falling snow sideways until it hits an obstacle -- a fence, a line of trees, a car, a house. More than once in my childhood, we woke up to find a snow drift so high it blocked our door to get outside, so my Dad and I had to hack our way through the snow until we could tunnel our way free, then knock enough of the white mountain down so we might rejoin the world, as it were, i.e., go to school/work.
No wonder my fantasies have always and only been about the tropics.
But, given my place of origin, my first experiences of love were about the warmth two people can generate together against the cold that surrounds them, just outside their car or apartment window. It's cozy and very nice.
On the other hand, I have traveled all around the world, including to tropical and semi-tropical venues on many continents. Making love in the tropics is an entirely different feeling than it is way up north. Fans and ice and air conditioning cool down the sweat that forms all over your body when you join forces with nature to drive your local temperature higher than would otherwise be tolerable.
Outside love-making, not an option in a snowstorm, is exciting in the warm regions, except for mosquitos, sand flies and the like. Still, the comfortably warm waters of the nearby sea, and a cool night breeze, welcome lovers on empty beaches wherever the equator is near enough to give them the opportunity to mate under the moon (or the sun).
Tonight, I am thinking about the many warm regions and all of the love I have known there. One of life's pleasures, for a man, is seeing women where clothes become thinner, smaller, sexier, and much more revealing. There is no denying that hot places create conditions where hot women become hot sights for horny men.
After all, it's much harder to get turned on by someone wrapped in 10 layers of fur and bent against a fiendishly cutting wind -- or maybe I underestimate the visual imagination of Eskimoes. If so, sorry.
I'm not sure where I am going with this. Oh yes. I love helping women shop for clothes, and always have. But not winter clothes. Summer clothes. In this way, like many men, I am excited at seeing what we really want to see from the women around us.
That's it. Watching and appreciating and imagining.
Except, when you remember that, in reality, it is not you now, but other men, who are having these visual gifts presented to them. Then, an inconsolable sadness sets in. They see what you cannot see. They can do what you cannot do -- make the approach, utter the compliment, begin the seduction.
Maybe you have to have grown up in Michigan or a similar place to fully appreciate what I am saying. There is a pain that only those far away, in the cold, or far away in any climate from the one we truly love, feel. Other men may watch her, the way she moves, the way her clothes sway, the way her hair swings, the way the air around her parts to let an Angel pass. These men have what you do not have: the opportunity to tell her just how beautiful she is -- what every woman (and every man) who has ever lived needs to hear. She, of course, will respond, as she must, given the natural order of things.
I know all that.
But I also believe that no one can utter the words of magic that I would say if I were there, as her witness, making warm nights much hotter than they otherwise ever could be with her new loves.Yet, lost as I am, only to imagine the view of others, leaves me as a blind man, groping in the dark for a touch that never will come, at least not from there.
All is silent again tonight, as it is every night, from the southern coast. Here, however, it is a warm San Francisco night. The streets are crowded with men and women, not needing our usual jackets or coats at all. So here, for once, the visual landscape is rich with beauty.
I think I will go out for my nightly walk.
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