Part 20

"I took you out to lunch."

"But you took lots of girls out to lunch."

"That was just for companionship or friendship. I just liked them, but I loved you. I thought about you day and night all through college, and for awhile after graduation, too."

"I wrote you a couple of love letters that I never sent."

"Gosh, I wish you'd said something."

"I wish you'd said something, too."

* As we pass through earthly life so quickly and only once, how sad that our fear of rejection is so often stronger than our love.

Seeing is Believing

One day an idle young man was wandering through the woods not far from his town when he happened upon an old woman standing around a rather smoky fire and stirring a kettle. Being the modern young man that he was, he immediately blurted out his first impression:

"Gosh, you're ugly and whatever you're cooking stinks," he told her.

"Well, if you don't like my looks," answered the old woman, "I can fix that." She then spoke a few strange words, which were followed by a dramatic puff of smoke, and the young man discovered, not that the old woman had transformed herself into a beautiful young maiden, but that the young man could no longer see.

"Now I've protected you from all ugliness and every unpleasant sight," said the woman. "And you'll remain this way until you can find someone to marry you. And it will have to be someone who can look beyond externals better than you, because I'm also changing your looks a bit." Here the woman gave a little laugh and uttered a few more unintelligible words. Soon there was another puff of smoke.

"Ooh, bummer," said the young man, feeling of the new bump on his nose and the deep wrinkles now in his cheeks.

When the young man returned to town, he quickly discovered that his social life was now pretty much a historical artifact. Whenever he went to a party, the reaction was always the same.

"What's wrong with him?" some girl would ask.

"He's gotta look that way until someone marries him," would come the reply.

"Hasn't that plot already been done?" the girl would say, walking off in another direction.

But, hey, this is a fairy tale and I'm in a good mood so let's say that finally, after many rejections, the young man found a nice girl who actually loved him as he was.

As the young man got to know her, he kept trying to imagine what she looked like. After awhile, he constructed a picture of her in his mind, so that whenever he looked in her direction, his imagined vision of her came before his eyes so vividly that he felt he could almost see her. He thought that he could very nearly see the slight curve of her lips, the sunlight shining in her hair, the expressions of delight or concern on her brow.

Well, anyway, things worked out so well that pretty soon the girl's father was mortgaging his house to pay for the wedding.

When the bride and groom awoke on the first day of their honeymoon, the young man discovered that his eyes had been opened. However, he also discovered that the girl lying beside him did not have the deep blue eyes with long eyelashes, or the upturned nose with little freckles of the girl he had been seeing in his mind. The young man, still in the habit of blurting out his first impression, said, "Gosh, you've changed."

"No," said his new wife. "The only thing that's changed is that now you can see. Oh, and you no longer have a bump on your nose."

"But where's your blonde hair?" the young man asked.

"My hair has always been this color," the girl said, fingering her chestnut tresses.

"But you look so different," the young man said, still confused.

"When you looked at me before," the girl explained, "you saw only your imagination. This is what I'm really like."

"I see," said the young man, as he embraced her and began to give her a thousand kisses.

"I know," she said.