I decided the time was now right to visit my doctor lover Mark in San Francisco. He had again become the focus of my every thought. I kept dreaming of the love we had shared so intensely but so briefly. That was now more than a year ago, since he had accepted a position all the way across the country. Something had subtly changed in our long-distance relationship lately but I couldn't put my finger on it. Mark and I had mutually agreed we would date others but we still did phone sex on a frequent basis.

Valentine’s Day rapidly approached on the calendar. I had postponed my trip to San Francisco originally scheduled for the day after Christmas until February because my father had surgery. I thought about the meaning of Valentine’s Day. It started in the Roman Empire as a fertility rite to honor gods and goddesses. The Catholic Church eventually changed the focus to the worship of a bishop named Valentine who had been beheaded on February 14, 269 A.D. because he secretly married couples contrary to the edict of Emperor Claudius II. In 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius designated February 14 to honor Saint Valentine. I had every intention of engaging in a fertility rite of my own with Mark on Valentine’s Day. Every time I thought about it I had to masturbate.

I met a real character on the flight to San Francisco. Henry was very old and told me he had a terminal illness and only a few months to live. He was quite tall and distinguished looking with white hair and a matching neatly trimmed beard. He wore a very expensive charcoal gray suit with a blue button-down shirt and black tie with some sort of emblem on it. I tried to visualize what he might have looked like when he was my age. Very handsome I imagined. Henry had no family and had chosen to spend his last days in San Francisco, the city of his youth. I could tell he was very lonely.

Henry entertained me with stories about the famous people he had known during his long life. Most of them had passed away but he made them come alive to me. He had known the late Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel and creator of the Barbie doll. I thought about telling him about my first best friend Emily and how we went from playing with Barbie to playing with each other. Yes, Emily had gone from touching Barbie's pussy to fondling mine. And then I did the same to her. Emily and I laughed about it when we rekindled our relationship recently. But I decided I didn't know Henry well enough yet to talk dirty, and besides, he looked like the sort that might spank me for being a bad girl if only he were a little younger.

Sixty some years ago Henry had a brief career in the major leagues. He roomed for a time with Enos Slaughter, a Hall of Fame player and legendary hell-raiser. But World War II and a severe bullet wound to his knee from a Nazi pistol ended that. Henry related he was being tortured at the time. Another of his best friends who had sadly passed away a couple years ago was Abba Eban, the diplomat who persuaded the United Nations to approve the creation of a Jewish state in 1948. Eban got Henry involved in the business of espionage and counter-intelligence. Later he became a soldier of fortune and then a private detective.

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