Touchstone

  I confess I have become a cynic when it comes to romantic love.   I watch those Hallmark movies and want to hurl when the same formula happens.   Boy meets girl.   Boy and girl don’t hit it off, they rub each other the wrong way and somehow in the space of say, a week or ten days, they find a spark and fall in love.   Or, they have a spark, have fun times, but… one of them manage to tick the other person off, the boy or girl storms out, a month or two passes, they find their way back to each other and… oh!! They can’t be without each other forever and ever amen! So, I gather by reading this diatribe you have figured out that I have not been lucky in love.   And yet, I do have in my library, a small collection of love poems!   Interesting oxymoron I know. I collect old books and one of the books I have in my collection is a book titled The Penguin Book of Italian Verse .  It’s a beauty, a first edition published in 1958.  And did I tell you? It smells wonderful! Yes, I smell books as