I knew that she was a little older than I, but she had held her age well. Sitting with the mid-day sun glowing on her skin, I thought her excitingly beautiful and radiant. When I first caught sight of her through the crowd I was careful to keep my distance, maneuvering to get a better look. I noticed that I wasn't the only one; other men turned discreetly to look. I could see by their expressions that they felt as I did. Even in her advancing years her skin was firm and tight. Had I been able, I might have caressed her. It was her simple, graceful beauty that men admired.
I remembered seeing her for the first time on a magazine-cover in America when I was in college. That was an impressionable age because I never really forgot and immediately recognized her through the throng moving her direction. I have to admit that from the very first I have lusted after her.
Let me digress to say that lust is a dangerous word. Our German neighbor called a few evenings ago and asked, "Habt ihr lust zu uns zu kommen?" (Did we wish, or, would we like . . . to visit them?) My language teacher used the word the next day in the context of whether we really wanted to speak German well. Curious, I watched a young Russian man in my 'grammar-school' class put the word into his electronic translator. He pushed the buttons and his face flushed with a genuine look of surprise.
"Nein . . ." he exclaimed, and hurriedly pushed the unit away.
I knew that she was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1936 and traveled a long way from home in the intervening years. Working a while in Oklahoma, she eventually migrated to the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and Montana before coming to reside in Germany. By all standards, she was one of Walter Beech's beauty queens. For those men who over the years had learned how to handle her, she responded willingly to a gentle touch. She's a love story often told: the beautiful Beechcraft, D-17, lovingly remembered by pilots as the 'Staggerwing Beech'.
