SUNBEAMS:...A Plain Valley Woman Moves West ...Looking For Love...Men At Large...A Day At The Grocery Store...Every Pear You Take...

 

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ / Fiction Editor

BROWNSVILLE, Texas |...Mona loved to see wild water in motion, whether in her glass-enclosed bathtub or at the lake or at the ocean. For her, every arriving wave was the essence of a potential boyfriend.

That last fat one here at the beach had to be the manager at work, a lecherous sort who'd just been dumped by his wife in a spectacular tale that was making its way into the local newspaper.

Picky, forty-year-old Mona was intrigued.

The indifferent Pacific never failed her. Day after day after wave after wave; she lapped it all up, at times with a tonguing of her lips, in the same manner that she ate convenience store popsicles and hard candy.

"I've got much to offer a man!" she would say aloud into the ocean headwinds. "Look at me, man! ...I'm the best game in town."

And, yes, she was. Mona Lisa De Leon, daughter of Brownsville, Texas, had left her scorching, humid bordertown for the beaches of California now going on 13 years ago.

One boyfriend in all that time, a fireman in Modesto. Mona Lisa thought highly of herself, of her chaste ways especially. Never an easy date even by California standards, she always let it be known that giving it up before the 10th date was a street harlot's move.

Then one day in April, she met Dan Pine at the corner grocery store, in the produce aisle, where she handled apples prior to tossing a few into her grocery cart. Dan strolled up and said go with pears.

Mona looked up to see the most rugged man she'd ever laid eyes on. No man back home looked like this. His heavy, bushy beard was like a pair on gray briefs all rolled up into a ball.

And so, she went ahead and bagged a half-dozen Bartlett pears, agreed to go out with Dan and then proceeded to live happily ever after with him.

When he died in a car crash 35 years later, Mona planted a young pear tree in her backyard and the tree is yielding the sweetest pears you'd want to taste...

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