It was the day before my second year of music school. Another flawless day in Santa Barbara.  Low 80s, deep blue sky, the hint of salt sea, night blooming jasmine, and Mexican food in the air of the barrio where we lived. A day that just couldn’t be allowed to go to waste. My best friend, Andy, another friend, a tiny little Asian American girl, Stella? and I put on our bathing suits and headed to Butterfly Beach in her little white VW Bug. Our last hurrah before we hit the practice rooms and books.  We looked pretty good back then.  Andy  came from good Presbyterian stock.  High cheekbones, dark eyes, the jawline of a singer (with room to resonate), a pretty face with freckles, shoulder length reddish brown hair and bangs. Long legs, short torso which accentuated her ample bosom.  I was petite, long light brown hair, green eyes, tight but not ample anywhere.

We spread out several beach blankets on prime real estate on the beach which was a popular and particularly scenic stretch of sand, away from the wharf, and the traffic around State Street in a fancier part of town near the Four Seasons Biltmore. Between work and practice we really didn’t have much time to hang out on the beach, so we were on the pasty side for beach goers.  Andy with her freckles never really tanned anyway.  Her boyfriend, on the other hand, was a surfer – her boy toy of sorts.  He had wavy, longish hair bleached by the sun, a chiseled body baked to the perfect golden brown from sitting on his board in the surf all day.  She was a Music/Business Econ double major who never studied because she had perfect pitch and a photographic memory. She skimmed her books and was done studying.  Music theory came easy. That poor guy was a Business major and was always frustrated because he had to study so hard to keep his head above water academically, and here she was cruising through two majors seemingly effortlessly.  But he was very pretty, very pretty indeed, especially for a Jewish guy. But I digress. He wasn’t there.

I got bored of “lying out” and took a walk along the waterline.  I saw a really cute orange mop dog, with crazy, long, wiry fur, wide, stout low-slung body, and a large head with a huge maw, carrying a big stick and watching something out in the water, and following it.  He was up for a game of fetch, so I threw the big stick several times, and he was on that thing. He loved it.  But he was always following his person in the water. Soon he started wagging his tail and got excited. He saw his human paddling in from the breakers, so I left him to it, not wanting to interfere with the big reunion.

I watched the scene from my blanket.  The dog was barking toward the water, and a man was swimming in from quite a distance.  He emerged from the water, and it was like watching the male equivalent of Aphrodite rising out of the sea foam – a perfect California specimen, glistening in the sun. Sandy hair, square jaw, strong but not overly beefy, wide shoulders, narrow waste with that delicious V framing his ridged stomach muscles. Oh. My. God.

He played with his dog on the way back to his beach towel.  He had the same sort of easy gait I had seen as a toddler when a handsome cowboy had walked past my table at breakfast in Montana and blew me away by tugging his hat brim and saying “Howdy ma’am.” I must have been yelling something like “Look at the cowboy Mommy!”  – really don’t remember.  He must have done that to make a towheaded toddler’s day.  But in any case, we girls all took notice of THIS cowboy. He resembled  Robert Redford more than a little from that distance.

He had a frisbee with him, and the dog was crazy for it.   He looked like a long haired, ginger pit bull doing ballet, a canine Nureyev jeteing ten feet in the air, catching the disc in his massive jaws. It was something to behold.He never missed.  Until the wind kicked up and blew the frisbee onto our beach blanket and he dug the place up in his frantic effort to retrieve his quarry.

The “specimen” came running over to help us shake the sand out of our clothes, off the blanket, and to apologize.   He said, “My name is Valdo.  I’m really sorry about this.  Can I get you ladies a drink or something?  I’d really like to make this up to you.”  I thought he had said his name was “Valdor” and, this being California, I was deflated – another California weirdo. I said, “Thanks VALDOR. You must be from Planet X.  We can’t take you to our leader. Nice meeting you. See you later. Buh bye!” He replied, fully understanding what I was getting at, “No! No. My name is Valdo.  Like Waldo with a V. Just call me Dave. It’s my middle name. I really am serious. I’m sorry for Baddog tearing up your stuff.  Can I get you some beers? Take you girls to dinner or something?”  His dog’s name was Baddog. How cool was that? He looked as good close up as he did from afar. A Hubbell Gardiner to my Katie Morovsky.  A goy dream boy.

It was getting to be dinner time. But we were all covered with the detritus from a day at the beach.  I looked at Andy (What do you think? Please, please, please!!!), and she said she’d call her boyfriend to see if he could join, and we decided to head back to our apartment not too far from the beach to get cleaned up.  Maybe Andy was driving our other friend back – or perhaps Stella had already left, or perhaps she wasn’t even there. The details of the day faded with the new prospect. The beautiful”specimen” offered to drive someone back.  And like an idiot, I got into the white Toyota pickup of a complete stranger, albeit a beautiful stranger and showed him how to get to my home.  Luckily, “Valdor” turned out not to be a serial killer. We all rinsed off the salt, sand, and sweat, and put on fresh clothes in our little upstairs apartment in a big old house in the barrio.

Andy’s boyfriend joined us I believe – I think they drove separately in her VW to the Rose Cafe, a well-known Mexican establishment near my neighborhood, but I can remember “the specimen” opening the door for me, pulling out my chair for me, and paying the entire tab.  We were starving college kids. He told us how he injured his back fighting a wildfire – and how part of his physical therapy involved snorkeling in the salt water several hours a day to take the pressure off his spine. Normally he wouldn’t be around this time of year – it was fire season – but he was still convalescing a little. This guy was too good to be true. He was a firefighter?  A freaking hero type? No way.

Andy and I had to get back to get ready for the first day of classes.  He walked me up to the door of the apartment, and said with a bit of a western twang “I’d like it really a lot if you’d go out with me again.”  I said “Okay.” We set a date and time.  Years later he told me he gave Baddog a steak for dinner that night.

The “specimen”  was a little late to the next date as I recall, it made me start to wonder if maybe he was a mere mortal after all. But there had been a fire, or a rescue or something that afternoon – which was a better excuse than most.  He wore a tie.  His shirt fit him well.  On the way to the Italian restaurant on the other side of town, traffic was backed up because of a stalled vehicle in the middle of a busy intersection.  It was an elderly lady – carbon copy of the “where’s the beef” lady – gray bun, specs and all.  She was crying because she was scared. No one was stopping, or even slowing down much. The “specimen” pulled his truck over, and walked up to the woman’s car holding his arm out to signal cars to to slow down to let him cross.  He asked her if she was okay to make sure it wasn’t a medical emergency, told her he was going to push her car to the side of the road.  He helped her out of the car, hugged her shoulders, told her it was going to be fine, took her to the sidewalk. He tried to start the car and saw she was just out of gas and pushed the car to the curb. She stopped crying. He got gas for her at a nearby gas station while I waited with her, and put a few gallons in her tank, gave her another sideways hug, and sent her on her way, refusing the money she offered, of course, and reminding her to go straight to the gas station to fill her tank up the rest of the way.

By this time, we were quite late for dinner.  But who cared? Was this guy for real?  How many kind of shitty boyfriends had I had?  How many boyfriends didn’t really go out on “dates”, or cheated, or were intellectually competitive and impossible to have a normal conversation with (this was especially aggravating when they thought they were smarter than I, and I knew they weren’t, which would be most of them), or never did anything nice for me?   How many of them would have helped that lady?  Few, if any. What a bunch of jerks.

At dinner we made the usual date small talk. He asked me about school, where I was from.  Then it was his turn to tell me about himself. He put his fork down.  He spoke for quite a while about where he grew up, his hardscrabble life, his mom, his sisters, his uncles and aunts and cousins, his job. Yes he had always wanted to be a firefighter, and he had been fighting fires since he was 19. He talked about his grandfather who was a real cowboy – a fast shooting champion, and rope trick rodeo cowboy. When he was done he picked up his fork and finished eating. He had a formal, almost military manner of speech.  Cars were “vehicles”, yes was “affirmative”.  His very blue eyes were kind, unveiled, and mischievous at the same time. He had an electric smile, a little crooked.  I really can’t remember the conversation. I can’t remember if he was funny that night. He’s very funny.  I do remember him walking me to the door again, and saying in that western twang ” I’d like it really a lot if I could kiss you goodnight.” I thought, “Well hell!  If you ask so nicely!” So we did. I was on the stair above him, but he was still taller than I. I had to peek.  His closed eyes were sweet. It was really nice.  He said goodnight and dashed down the stairs. That was date two.

We decided to go on two more planned dates.  I would pick one, and he would pick one.  I got us tickets to a Burning Spear Reggae concert. The band members have radical dreadlocks.  One guy had a single giant dread like a column under a tall hat.  Being a Country fan, this was a first for him, and he got a huge kick out of it.  There was a big dance floor/mosh pit and everyone was packed in, bouncing to the Nyabingi rhythms. The air was thick with pot smoke. One guy was incredibly high or drunk, and kept ramming into the crowd on purpose.  Valdo warned the offender to knock it off before someone got hurt.  And again. But he was persistent.  I’m sure he ran into me. That was the last straw. Valdo gently directed me to the front of the stage with his hands around my waist so I could actually see the band, and to try to get me out of that idiot’s way, and I was having a great time dancing in my little black dress. Unbeknownst to me, the next time that asshole came bashing through the crowd behind me, Valdo held out his arm and slapped him hard on the side of his head and the guy fell like timber.  He was still behind me and just danced me away from the “scene of the crime”.  I had no idea that had happened for many years. That was date number three.

Next up was National Team Penning Championship Rodeo Dance up in the Santa Ynez mountains.  The cowboy was taking me to a rodeo dance.  For real. Driving in my boyfriend’s pickup truck to a rodeo dance. No nice Jewish doctors would be in attendance. It would be a Jew-free zone, with the exception of myself. Knishes and chopped liver would not be on the menu. This was the first night I met any of his friends. And the whole place was cowboys and cowgirls in their full regalia.  Dad would plotz if he saw me there.

The first person I met was a mountain of a man named Bill.  A biker. This person is 6’5″ or 6’6″ of solid muscle with a spherical head that is so muscular he has to cut off the plastic tabs in the back of his ball caps to make them big enough to fit.  He had a blond fu manchu, a smooth, ruddy, round face and pale blue eyes, and his shoulders directly met his head, more or less bypassing a neck.  Not a body builder. Just a human boulder. He had massive hands.  He leaned down and shook my hand, almost a formal bow, and was very polite, very pleased to meet me, but I felt like Woody Allen himself. I thought certainly a giant neon sign on my forehead was flashing JEW JEW JEW.  I was going to be outed and lynched. I told Valdo so.  He laughed.  He knew I was in the great American wilderness, the deepest, darkest jungle among the cannibals who live west of the Hudson River. Surely the Brooklyn accent I had until I was 8 from living in my house was seeping out again, during some kind of spontaneous,  involuntary, neurotic rant and would reveal my true identity.  Then he introduced me to his friend Chris who went by the nickname “Dudley” because he looked, and acted a little like Dudley Dooright.  Okay.  Maybe safe. I met a few other crew mates, all good-looking firefighters, and plenty of other friends, all nice enough. Maybe I could “pass”.

Valdo and his white sideways smile was in his element.  Normally not one for dancing, he twirled, two-stepped, and dipped me all night in his pearl snap shirt, cowboy boots and big belt buckle.  He still liked me. I still liked him.  My Jewish mother’s nightmare. That was date four.