Field Notes by Cyrano’s De Bergerac’s Dumbass Dufus Great-Nephew (episode #666, Roxane 2.0, 1975)
A great many moons ago, when I was young, feckless, and still believed in the excesses of romantic love, I regularly waxed passionate about a hot young nursie (RN) named J., with whom I was infatuated.
J. was a brunette, a graduate of Sister Joseph-Mary Aloysius Stavros’s star Jesuit parochial class for high-achievers at a private academy in the Bronx (NYC) and a five-star pupil of the upper-level Catechism class before finally graduating with a BS (and going on to get an MSN). J. was slim, outrageously fit, and tanned so easily that in summertime she typically had a bronze tone all over except for the lighter areas of her that were covered by a skimpy tank-suit. She loved to swim and was an excellent breast-stroker, no joke intended.
We first met through a good friend of mine in 1969 and although she left a string of bereaved lovers in her wake, I was NOT deterred a whit and pursued her with a vengeance that would have made Paris’s pursuit of King Menelaus’s Helen seem like nursery school stuff.
She also drove a bright red 1971 Porsche 914-4 (1.7 liter) with the elan of a regular female Sterling Moss, usually with her Belgian Malinois (‘Shiva’) riding co-pilot in that small two-seater, and the sight of her and Shiva in that car, bombing around just under the speed of light, was pretty startling stuff, oh yeah! You betcha! “Heart be still” type hormonal stuff.
J. was, when I first met her, was a skilled and experienced ICU/CCU nurse specialist, the result of having plenty of smarts inherited from her Greek father and Ukrainian mother. She also was a fully-actualised and determined young woman, accustomed to calling the shots in her personal life the way a Code Blue Team Leader would conduct an emergency cardiac resuscitation in an ER. Given that sort of sizzling energy level, her kinetics were off-the-charts. I used to compare its on me to how a containment worker at Chernobyl would feel in mid-melt-down. It affected me that way, at least. And given that sort of anima, I’ll leave it your imagination to guess what sex with her was like!
But my purpose here is neither to titillate you nor to help give you a glimmer of understanding of what a relationship with her was like. Today, as I was wandering lost (as usual) in the bowels of my vast PC archives, I stumbled across a whole file full of copies of letters she and I had exchanged over a range of years, spanning more than 3-decades. You see, I am so OCS that I actually save copies of EVERYTHING I’ve ever written, beginning back in grammar school (‘struth, I swear it on Blessed Saint Brigid’s holey knickers!). Copies are all neatly filed away in orderly chronological order in manila folders in my file cabinets. Some of the particularly interesting ones were saved to hard drive.
What follows is one of them, dated 19 August 1975, back when I was in charge of a pulmonary lab at a hospital in Walnut Creek (CA) during the day and attending classes in Berzerleley at night. My rare moments of fun & recreational pleasure usually took place on Sierra Nevada mountain-tops or on the Central California coastal beaches, since it was otherwise a pretty demanding and stressful life schedule to maintain.
What follows immediately below was not pecked out on a digital computer, of course, but on an old-fashioned typewriter. If you are so young that you have a bit of difficulty visualizing exactly what a “typewriter” is, you have my sincere sympathies. But, press on. What you’ll read is a retyped (on PC) copy of what that letter said, sent from me to ‘J’ in August of 1975.
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19 Aug 75
J,
Your letter arrived this morning and was handed to me in the midst of an examination. The patient probably thought I was going into grand mal seizures as she stared out at me from the viewing port of an ovoid fiberglass Plethysmograph (a whole-body-enclosing lab device for measuring respiratory function). What the ingestion of a large mug of Jamaica Blue Mountain typically does to me (pseudo grand mals), your letter approximated. I fumed, grinned, grimaced, frowned, smiled like an idiot and paced back & forth in front of the Iron-Maiden-like recording device like an IRS agent hot on the trail of a tax cheat; not to even mention the fact that I almost lost the critical timing sequence of the exam procedure my poor patient was undergoing.
Angry? Hell, I was furious! I was absolutely stark, raving pissed, as well as elated, overjoyed and exuberant as a kid as a kid in a Bronx candy store, while simultaneously as annoyed as a Great White Shark whose intended victim has successfully escaped to the safety of the beach. And all this before I even opened your damned envelope!
I waited quite a while before gingerly slitting it open (the envelope) with an at-hand disposable scalpel. The unfolded letter sat and stared balefully at me for a good 45 or so minutes on the adjacent desk, while I waited for the blinding surges of emotional blood-lust to subside, much as I would expect a massive tsunami to retreat after laying waste to all living matter in its path!
45 minutes later, I managed to glance around, noting no residuals of either a tidal wave or the remains of a burnt landscape evident. No patients in the lab, everything relatively quiet. HAH! The deceiving calm that follows any major release of natural energy, either natural or man-made. No holocaust scene, no screaming bystanders gaping, just pure silence.
And then, as I sat quietly reading your letter, the following images and sensations passed through my mind like a hot knife through butter.
How does an artist paint an obsession? How does a photographer project a blinding, all-compelling passion onto a two-and-a-quarter inch negative? How does a poet express the soul-twisting magnificence of a mountain’s chill dawn, swept by a sheet of icy winds at 13,000 feet...and capture it in a few well-chosen words that eventually end up in a battered manila file, somewhere, marked ‘REJECTS?’
How does the day begin and the night end? How does the first leaf sprout vigorously forth and the last one quietly fall? How does a sky-diver relate the heart-pumping sensation of a 10-second-free-fall, complicated by a fouled canopy, to his earth-bound friend?
How does a woman with smiling brown eyes bring a weary grin to the face of an elderly old man who is obviously burdened by pain and despair? How do you later fathom the depths of those same brown eyes, now aflame with an inner fire that could sear human flesh, whose deep whirlpools draw forth and suck the soul into a bottomless limbo of endless black space?
How can you relate a peak experience like the nurturing and growing of a near irrational caring emotion that threatens to overwhelm and rip coherency away, leaving in its place a stumbling, chaotic groping for words to express what no man throughout history has yet been able to describe in mere words?
How are you able to articulate the joy and pain, the elation and agony, the imagination and the depression, the creative genius and the catatonic numbness that wash the shores of life experience like splashing rivulets of a glacially blue, pure mountain stream, leaping, singing, crying and whispering the sacred secrets of the ages?
The beauty of a gentle voice in a moment of quiet sharing, or the peaceful aura that surrounds a strongly etched, flash of memory that a caring gaze confers from quick, darting dark eyes? How also the timeless grace of a completely defenseless and unguarded woman, coiled in sleep upon a mattress, trusting absolutely in the coming of another dawn the next day, with its share of anger, frustration, yet also beauty and happinesses untold?
Or a glass of darkest ruby-red wine, on a rug by an open hearth, fire blazing forth in a mountain cabin on a snowy evening? Or even the faint residual glimmer of prismatic color that bathes the highest mountain summits, perching for a mere second on their darkened stony shoulders before plunging into the eternal ebony of utter blackness? How?
No way, that’s how! Not a bloody Pale of a day goes by that I don’t vividly recall some activity we shared, some small, extraordinary adventure that we immersed ourselves in, some quotidian delight of absolutely no moment that you would never even remember now, whether it consisted of lying on a fog-bound sandy Carmel beach, hiking the depths of the impenetrable Los Padre National Forest, conquering Matterhorn Peak via the glacier diretissima, or screaming obscenities at each other after another of Shiva’s infamous commando-style ambushes of the neighbor’s mongrel (well, a pedigreed mongrel, I guess!) dog?
Your pictures are framed in my mind’s eye, on my mantel, in my car, in my developer and fixer, and even in the beefy paws of OFF BELAY Magazine’s photo editor!
There isn’t a single hour of any given day that I don’t indulge in a momentary reflection of you lying around the Strawberry Canyon Pool [Note: the UC Berkeley swimming complex.] in the summer sun, or curled up on the rug in front of the fireplace on a Sunday morning, with the New York Times still rolled up and awaiting pillaging, or smiling sidelong at a patient during a bit of warm small-talk. I will, for instance, never forget your panicky face, nor the exact words you uttered at a standstill, half-way down the face of the Matterhorn Glacier (or for that matter, the exact Humphrey Bogart tactics I was determined to use if you froze, refusing to move either up or down on that perilous incline), or the flash of those angry eyes in a moment of exasperated fury, or any of the million other images that reside permanently in my memories...all of the chill, exotic, chaotic and spectacular recollections swirling around the periphery of my mind. Enough for the whole complement of a lunatic asylum!
Nor can I ever again see a bright red Porsche 914 without immediately thinking of you and ‘Big Red.’
Hell, who could ever forget a beautiful cold-ass like yours? Let’s face it, you are still the damndest, most gorgeous hunk of moderately-liberated woman-flesh that ever lived, breathed, reclined, or warmed a Porsche bucket seat. Even your sweat smelled like the finest essence of myrrh!
But stay! At this point in my gushing, I am compelled to admit that beauty is, as it is always and eternally, a mere fleck in the conjunctiva of the beholder, although I can’t claim here to speak as a consensus. If Parbats [my Malamute at the time] were here, next to me, leaning his 120 pounds of doggy girth against my knees, he would surely wag his assurance of that!
Now that’s a very heavy load of free strokes for you, but hopefully you now are able to understand the immense handicap I operate under when confronting just a damned little scrap of fold paper from your envelope, let alone you in the flesh, at the quivering end of a hot spear of pure lust. End of holocaust.
As far as thanking me for being me, no thanks are needed, I simply wanted to share an appreciation of my world with you in it, from my present perspective, far from Joseph Smith’s beehive. You are still and ever shall remain my much-loved friend whom I care for more than any other single aspect of my variegated life, and I am very proud of your spirit of adventure and your accomplishments in those two areas of life that I appreciate so much. I think you, above all else, one hella fine woman!
You know and can always depend on that, regardless of whatever this world brings down on both or either of us as the future unravels!
Much love, K.
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Read over today (February 2026), the above paean of poorly cobbled-together happy horsesh*t reads like the 8th-grade paper of a less-than-gifted enrollee in what used to be called “the slow class” (you know, the guys that rode to school in the little yellow bus, and now called “the differently abled class” in WOKE-speak jargon). It remains, however, as a testament to the amorous ruminations of a late-20s’ish, true-blue, full-blown romantic in the ancient, original mode. This was, of course, before antagonists of Toxic Masculinity rebuffed the standard “Drop your pants, baby, I think I lust you!” come-on that sufficed for foreplay among hot blooded young 70s-era studmuffins (before Gen Z decided to just eschew sex altogether, LoL, and be celibate).
In today’s Hawai’i, even the traditional “Wanna poke squid?” pidgin come-on has been diluted to a mumbled suggestion. Things change and so do we, yet Edmund Rostand’s somewhat astoundingly prescient 1897 play paralleled this phase in my early life, if a lot more articulately. “J” was my Roxane; I fancied myself as Cyrano. Even though there was always a lot of Don Quixote of La Mancha mixed in with my Cyrano identity, this particular segment of my life was a modern counterpart to Rostand’s classic tale of (not QUITE completely) unrequited love (she was still the best coital engagement I’ve ever experienced...in this life or any other)!
Have fun and indulge in a few chuckles over what this letter contains but remember, it all took place nearly a half-century ago, before I became the burned-out husk of a cynical, pessimistic proto-Céline that I am now...and be kind!
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Following are a couple of choice quotes from Rostand’s famous play:
On the nature of a kiss (Perhaps the most famous description of a kiss in history!): “A kiss, when all is said, what is it? An oath that’s given closer than before; a promise made more specific; a seal on a confession; a rosy dot placed on the ‘i’ of loving.”
On the power of words (how Cyrano’s words fly to her like birds but they are heavy with his heart): “My words, like hesitant ghosts, go climbing up to you... My heart has always hidden behind my wit... I speak to you from the depths of a dream.”
On Loving Her Completely (in which Cyrano admits that his love is so vast it encompasses every tiny detail about her): “I remember last year, on the twelfth of May, you changed the way you wore your hair! I have lived so much in your light that, like someone who has looked too long at the sun, I see crimson circles everywhere I look!”
On the Beauty of the Night (Cyrano uses the darkness to explain why he can finally be honest): “Tonight, it seems to me that I am speaking to you for the first time... for in the protective dark, I dare to be myself.”
A real life 1975 parallel to Edmond Rostand's famous 1897 play, Cyrano De Bergerac, starring instead one of my own muses, "Roxane 2.0" who is still a very good friend after all these years.