She was His First Love

She was everything he dreamed of, his first love. She was curved in all the right places & slim where she should be slim. Her movements were smooth & graceful, every movement flowing like a predator. Tony loved her with all his heart, from a distance. He knew from the moment he saw her that she was the one. He made up his mind he would have her once he made enough money to treat her right.

Tony took the job in 1957 to start the process of gathering the money he needed to finance the dream of having her. After all she would not be treated right by a poor man. It was a simple factory job. Not great in pay & it would take a while to make enough money to treat her properly. It was difficult to keep the job, long hours with little to show for it, but every day he would pass her by on the street & be inspired again. The days turned into weeks, weeks into months, & then into years. He came close to having the money he felt he needed, several times. Unfortunately he needed transportation to work, so he bought a used car & all the emergency repairs that came with it. It seemed as though the used car was fearful of his dream girl & thought that once he had her the used car would be replaced. So he would build up his money & then deplete it on repairs, always holding onto the dream that once he had enough she would be his.

After the first year, he stopped passing her on the street on a daily basis. He still saw her around just not every day. It seemed someone else had noticed her beauty & she went away with him. He would see her at the grocery store, sometimes at the mall, & as the years went by he saw her less & less. It seemed as they both got older she was out and about less and less. To everyone else she grew older & less beautiful with each passing year, something to be used & discarded when something better came along. To Tony her beauty never faded, after 20 years of working he felt finally had enough money to have the nest egg he felt he needed to take care of her. He had never married, nor had any children, so focused on the dream of her, that marriage was not something he even contemplated. Years went by as he searched for any sign her. Lamenting the choice he made so many years ago, his family began to worry for him. They too started to search hoping beyond hope that he would find her and be content.

As the years passed Tony got older and retirement loomed. The dream began to fade & hope to die that he would ever find her again. One by one the friends stopped looking. The family still tried on occasion even to the point of hiring a private detective. He followed the trail from man to man tracing the years and the last man could not give him a name to go on. The trail ended. Alas Tony was heartbroken. Tony gave up his dream, he retired and stayed in the house, barely leaving his chair and reading old car magazines. It was just a matter of time before he passed on, he had focused on the dream for so long that once it was gone he was not far behind it. At a junk yard, just a few days after Tony died; the young man was new on the job and looked at an old 57 Chevy in the back of the yard. He said "Wow this thing needs to be crushed. It's older than dirt. Who could drive something like this?" The old man, who had worked there for years, smiled sadly & shook his head. The old man said "She don't look like much to you and me son, but somewhere someone loved her with all their heart and would be heartbroken to see her go." If they had only known Tony who had lived three blocks away...