July 10: "Joy''

A few of you have noted that presence of a certain fetching brunette on my Facebook photo gallery, whose company I am enjoying of late.

Her name is Joy and she lives in Alabama, about 20 miles from Columbus near a town whose name mysteriously evades me, even though I’ve been through it several times on visits to see her and I’ve heard the name of the town many, many times since Joy and I began seeing each other about six weeks ago. It starts with a “C’’ and, somehow, I can never remember the name of the town. There may be some pathology associated with this. I find that I am mystified by meaningless things these days.

For example, I had a Spanish test on Friday. In that test, we were supposed to conjugate verbs in the past tense according to the “fill in the blank’’ sentence. We were given the verb in English, so we had to know the Spanish verb and be able to conjugate it according to person, gender and number. As fate would have it, the one verb I could not recall wound up in three different questions. It was the verb “to arrive.’’ I guessed “salir’’ and conjugated the verb accordingly in each of the questions. But I am not sure at all that “salir’’ is the Spanish verb for “to arrive.’’

And two days later, I’m still not sure what the verb is. You would think I would have looked it up, but oddly enough I haven’t. Last night, I dreamed about whether “salir’’ is or isn’t the Spanish verb for “to arrive.’’ I cannot tell you how often I have worried over this matter during the past 48 hours. And yet, even now, I don’t look it up.

So, yes, I may have some “mental health’’ issues.

But my mental state is not the purpose of this post. The purpose of the post is to tell you about my new friend.

As I said, her name is Joy. I have no idea what the town is where she lives. I’m pretty sure it’s not “Salir, Alabama’’ though.

The first thing you might notice about Joy, should you meet her, is that she is tall and lean. She says she’s 5-11. I say she’s 6-foot. We went to dinner last week and she wore heels. She TOWERED over me and I’m 5-foot-11.

She is the youngest of four girls and lives in a little house that is part of her family’s 140-acre spread.

She is an independent contractor, an expert on nuclear power plants and has been all over the U.S. and the world with her work. In a decidedly man’s world, she commands respect.

That’s one side of her.

The other side of Joy is revealed only when she is back “home’’ in Alabama. The woman works like field hand – she can handle any repair job you can think of. She’s comfortable with almost any tool or piece of equipment you put in front of her and it’s not uncommon to see her soaked with sweat and smiling through an inch of dust and grime from a long day’s work on “the property.’’ She can shoot a deer, catch a fish, build a duck blind, drive a tractor and bush-hog a field.

And yet, she can knock your eyes out in a cocktail dress and rock a bikini in a way that women 20 years younger can only envy. She is bronzed from the sun and strong from hard manual labor. But she is in every way as feminine as any model.

In fact, she was a model. She was featured in magazines and sales fliers and was the month of May in a “Girls of LSU’’ swimsuit calendar in the mid-80s when she was living in Baton Rouge, even though she never attended a class at LSU (She got her degree from MUW).

She is a woman of remarkable energy; a vibrant, passionate, caring woman.

And she likes me, which I find as perplexing as Spanish verbs.