One day the conversation slipped from business to personal and it was like a trap door opened up under me and I fell into a vast warm world of compatibility, friendship, and who knows what..maybe even love. I think each of us was as surprised as the other.

It didn't start out that way. I don't remember the exact point where the talk shifted, but it had something to do with her job. She didn't like it and was thinking about moving.

Somewhere along the way I asked if she was married and she mentioned a fiance and being worried about combining her life with someone else now that she'd just finally gotten her life together living alone and liking it. I mentioned I was sort of going in the other direction, having lived with someone for a long time, and increasingly not liking the situation and wanting to recapture my life. In not a very long time we'd each managed to state the essence of our present status and our hopes, aspirations and fears, both being on the cusp of change, and needing something or someone to push us over the edge. After that conversation I thought about it again and again.

It was extraordinary.

I couldn't remember when I'd had so frank and freewheeling a conversation with a woman. It had been like talking to my best friend, only I don't have a best friend to have those kind of conversations with. I really wanted to call her up and set up a lunch or something, anything, just to see her. Until that conversation we'd been at most casual business acquaintances, having been tossed together to do a project which was why we had the conversation in the first place. My visual recollection of her was that she was pretty, but not extraordinarily so.

Blond, but not naturally, but the kind of person who once they become blond, it fits perfectly. A blond personality in a brunette package. But calling her up to ask her out to lunch kept getting postponed. I was afraid to ask. Maybe the phone conversation was a total anomaly for her, and the next time I talked to her, she'd pull over her professional mask, and it would be back to business as usual. The warm and fond memory of that conversation finally won out, and I called her office. She'd quit and moved out of town. See what you get for waiting too long to follow up on your gut instinct. Her former secretary was extremely reluctant to give out personal information like what her new phone number and address was. As a last resort I told the secretary to tell my friend I really needed to talk to her, so if she the secretary ever heard from my friend again, please tell her and ask if I could get in touch. Weeks went by and then the secretary called with phone number and address. I immediately called and a man answered and advised me that she was asleep. This at around 3 O'clock in the afternoon. I soft placeumed the man was her fiance.

But she picked up the phone quickly, and I nearly melted when I heard her voice. I don't know how one can fall for someone just hearing their voice, but if that is possible, I was dropping from the sky like a stone, falling somewhere. The conversation was short and directed. I needed to get her up to date with the project we'd been working on and find out if she was still going to be involved. She was. I asked if she had started looking for a job in her new city, and she hadn't. I had some leads and shared them with her.

She mentioned she wasn't sure if she wanted to jump back into the world again or not. I suggested she needed to keep her foot in the door, because she was in the right place at the right time, and the opportunities for her were considerable. In a way the conversation had picked up right where it had left off, strategizing the future. Afterwards I tried to convince myself she was just naturally open and communicative and I was reacting not to any special interest on her part, but simply from the lack of any warm, human contact for a long time. But if life had taught me anything, it was that warm, human contact was exceedingly rare...and even if she was non-specific in her focus, it was still a treat to deal with her. I bet she is extremely successful, because she is one of those people who is instantly liked. From the Adventures of the Old Guy in Cyberspace