Waiting on Haight, ******* the gold beading of a thrifted 80s shirt inside my purse,
I listen for the 71.

He tells me, from under a nose cherry-red and with a cantaloupe and a spoon resting in his lap,
of how when he was 25, he holed up with an 18 year-old girl.

One night she leaves for an ex-boyfriend's, saying she felt compelled to him, like there was a magnet between them. And he said he went to the closet, he smelled her sweater and knew what he wanted.

He got some cardboard and fashioned a fake magnet, the classic horseshoe shaped and silver-tipped kind, out of cardboard. He turned it into a necklace and waited for a day with some red roses for her to get back.

She came back and said she couldn't remember the last time someone got her flowers. And then she called her mother, and her mother asked him sternly if he was planning to marry her.
He was bewildered a little, but he said yes (this was the sixties).
And he finished the call to her mother and she was standing with her hands on her hips, "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Aren't you going to ask me to marry you?"
(I laughed at this point)
"Oh..."
                                                  ­                                        . . .
"Will you marry me?"
"Yes!"

I asked what happened and he said they were together for three years. But it was a blissful three years.

He asked me if it was a good idea for a movie.
I said yes. But I probably wouldn't see that movie. I left that second part out.