“A smoldering sexuality that spoke to me almost immediately. When he first spoke, his masculine baritone moved my soul. His eyes sparkled with intelligence, his smile was like a secret shared just between the two of us, and his shoulders were broad and strong. I was smitten, and have never failed to feel my pulse race and my heart pound in his presence, even 40 years later. This was the man I wanted to father my children!!!”
Had I known all this passion and purple prose boiled just under the surface of the guy with the 1970s hair and black rimmed glasses I had just met in Hatch Hall that summer of 1975, Blake's career path might have been so different!
And we, these forty years later, would no doubt be lounging on a sunny deck somewhere with a water view thanks to his long and wildly successful career as an author of one-a-year bodice rippers….under a nom de plume, of course.
But, no, instead, what I saw was a fairly serious guy deeply involved in a book...a guy who turned out to be a teller of tales, a baseball fan, and someone who was never boring. Turns out this was indeed someone I could grow old with, someone I could sit on a front porch with, surrounded by grandkids. Blake always envisioned himself dispensing grandfatherly wisdom to an audience of upturned and adoring faces, but the grandchildren of real life don’t sit still long enough for long speeches. And they’ve learned the same lesson I have...that Grandpa would rather spin a good yarn than tell the gospel truth…..
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