He gassed up all the cars.

Though she was quite striking in appearance, she had a pleasingly unpretentious attitude about herself.

She loved soft, faded, denim jeans worn low, without a belt.

She drove her 1968 Mustang with the windows down and let her blonde hair pony-tail carelessly down her back or fly into her eyes as the wind blew it.

She almost never waited for me to open doors or pull out chairs, and when we were together, always spent freely her "mad-money" even though she was never mad.

She regularly and spontaneously laughed out loud at all my jokes.

All these attributes made her doubly attractive and made men want to cater to her, something she must have known and accepted, but never seemed to misuse to gain any personal advantage.

I saw what I think is a metaphor for the root of her quiet confidence played out in her home every Sunday night. Over the course of an hour or so after dinner, her Dad would dutifully drive the four cars driven by the women in her family to the full-service gas station down the street from their home. He attended to the Mother's oversized Buick, and then, in turn, each of the other cars that she and her two sisters drove. He filled each gas tank, checked the oil and other fluids, cleaned the windshields and vacuumed the insides as needed to ready them for the coming week.

Clearly, she and the other women of her household were catered to, but by my observation, the catering was performed without expectation or demand on their part or complaint on his.

And, I saw each of them reciprocate in kind by attending to his preferences at the dinner table or by giving him their genuine, interested attention when he spoke to them.

Together, they played out what by today's standards are very traditional roles without formality or ceremony, and not by imposition, but rather by choice and with mutual and unconditional affection. That attitude towards life is what I believe made her enormously attractive.

©2007 David R. Childress. All Rights Reserved.