An e-mail arrives, from persons unknown, from parts unknown – subject heading: "Hey sexy music prof."
No, it's not spam – or at least not mass-produced spam.
A viola player, from the US; his website shows him to be a cheerful bear type, with a beard (I'm a sucker for facial hair – can barely see men who don't have facial hair, but tend to be an easy mark for any who do) and startlingly blue eyes.
He tells me he thinks I'm cute –
I parry: it's an old photograph.
But I am polite: thank you though.
He ripostes: I'll be in London in November, are you near there –
a double parry: no, I'm nowhere near, it's as far as Detroit to New York – culturally anyway;
and I'll be in the US on those dates anyway.
He still wants my number, he wants to call some day, in a fit of amorous energy.
Very well, then....
Isn't it in Peter Beagle's masterwork The Last Unicorn, where the wizard Schmendrick is tied to a tree – and the tree somehow falls in love with him, by contact apparently – the wizard excuses himself with the fiction of an arranged marriage, to a mountain larch – and the tree swells with jealous rage, to kill him with his bonds – and so the lovely line: "... gave himself up for loved"?
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