I’m working on designs tonight.

When I’m sitting at the drafting table I’ll often have the TV in my office running in the background; white noise to help me focus, or an occasional distraction from the task in front of me. Tonight Spike TV is playing Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. With my back to the TV I heard a couple bars of the Star Wars theme, a staccato blast of trumpets and trombones warning of a climactic scene, transporting back in time about twenty five years, back to when I owned the Star Wars theme on 45. (Yes, I’m that old.)

I was in my early teens and never had any money, so the only records I had were ones my parents gave me. They’d given me the Star Wars 45 as a gift, the aural bookend to a gift a year or two earlier, the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I’d play those records, my few cassettes and the radio on a small, mostly plastic, all-in-one gray box of a stereo. With electrical tape over the red “Power” and green “Stereo” indicator lights so as not to alert my parents to my blatant bedtime rule-breaking, I’d plug in my Pioneer headphones and late into the night I’d listen to those records or the cassettes of music I’d lifted from my favorite radio station. Or once in a while every time I could, I’d follow the edict of the raging hormones in my teenage body and navigate the FM dial to find the queen of FCC-approved sex talk at the time, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. I’d listen in titillated gravity as young men would call in and describe the obvious coital problems associated with being so large as to need a third leg for their jeans, or young women calling in to find out if it was normal for their boyfriends to request them to perform sundry depraved acts with/on/to them.

There I was, all alone, late at night, still years away from losing my virginity, thinking about but not having any sex.

Fast forward 25 years later and here I am, almost 40, two young children and one small business.  It’s again late at night, and now thanks to that little flashback, I’m thinking about sex.  Again.  But with being up past midnight many nights working on designs and Diane usually exhausted from chasing the kids around the house and the town all day, I realize that it’ll again be a long while before the planets align and our schedules, energy levels and desires will coalesce for an evening of carnal pleasure.

I feel 13 again.

hurray.