Aphrodite and Obadiah Greene: a Love Story: A Story of Love

By Arthur Stanley Katz

This is a love story about the healing power of love. Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and Obadiah Greene, an eighty-year-old conservative Jew and two years an embittered widower, meet and fall in love. By word and by deed, Aphrodite revives Obadiah’s spirit and fulfils his physical and mental needs and leads him to discover and marry a beautiful Jewish widow, who is years younger than him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543454543

Arthur Stanley Katz

Born: March 21, 1923 in Brooklyn, NY. Gave up his College Student’s Draft Deferment Status to enlist in the United States Cavalry on November 16, 1942. Honorably Discharged November 18, 1945. Served with the 86th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron attached to the Sixth Armored Division in General Patton’s Third Army in Europe. Fought in all of Patton’s engagements, including the Battle of the Bulge. Wounded twice, awarded two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. Fluent in German, at the war;s end, he joined the Army’s Military Government unit in Wuerttemberg, Germany where, on the 16th of June 1945, he met Anneliese Baur from the Black Forest Region of Germany, and fell instantly in love. They were married for 55 years. Anneliese gave him five wonderful children: three boys, two girls. Anneliese succumbed to Alzheimer’s on 20 March 2002. Arthur practiced Intellectual Property Law for 50 years. Author: From the Embers Rising: How WWII and the love of a courageous, beautiful German girl shaped two lives.

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Copyright © 2018 by Arthur Stanley Katz. 756540

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017915131

ISBN:   Softcover     978-1-5434-5455-0

             Hardcover   978-1-5434-5456-7

             EBook         978-1-5434-5454-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 03/15/2018

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Contents

Author’s Note:

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

Aphrodite and Obadiah -New Chapter Twenty

Chapter 20 In which Aphrodite gives me some specific advice:

Chapter 20 A

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

I wish to thank my beloved son, Dr. Jonathan David, PhD, Doctor and Research Scientist at the Cincinnati Childrens Hospital for his invaluable help in transferring my manuscript with as many images to my publisher. I could not have done this by myself, Jonathan, I love you!

Dad

APHRODITE AND OBADIAH

A Story of Love

Arthur Stanley Katz

image%201.jpg

Statuette of Aphrodite untying a sandal (Sandalbinder)

Greek, East Greek

Late Hellenistic Period

1st century B.C.

Place of Manufacture: Smyrna, Ionia, Asia Minor

Terracotta

ONE

It was two thirty in the afternoon of a balmy mid-June day when I pulled into the parking lot of this café on the outskirts of Clines Corners on US 40 about 50 miles east of Albuquerque. I had intended to bed down that night in Albuquerque, but fatigue had begun to wrap its arms about me and I thought it prudent that I find a place for the night, albeit short of my goal. I was 80, sound of mind and body, aside from a gimpy leg, and a broken heart, the former a souvenir of WWII, the latter, the result of the catastrophic loss of my belóved wife of almost six decades - and I was driving across America, back to California, that Golden State in which, for fifty years, my bride and I had raised our five children, and made our fortunes, such as they were.

My children had objected to my driving alone, at my age, across a continent. I knew their concerns - I had fallen twice the past year, nothing broken - but I don’t believe they understood my reasons for going. A man remains a man, regardless what the calendar says, and despite the fact that I’ve shrunk three inches since I enlisted in the Cavalry in November of 1942. My trip was to be incontestable evidence - I am a lawyer, have been for over sixty years, and to the annoyance of my kids, I frequently talk like one - that my journey, at the rate of about 200 miles a day, would be proof positive (there I go again) that I still had the mental and physical abilities to drive 3,000 miles across the country, and the chutzpah, the balls, to attempt the feat. Yet here I was, short of my intended goal, dropping in to ask where I might find a local motel, which, if found, would soon have me taking my afternoon nap, and a few more hours that night.

Upon crossing the threshold of the café I walked into a Norman Rockwell world. I half expected to see an open Saturday Evening Post on one of the round marble tables, which, with their bentwood backed chairs, flanked the large window lined parking lot side of the café. On the other side of the room was the soda fountain counter, with its mahogany top and row of round soda fountain seats. And, in the farthest corner of the room, a pool table. Aside from the soda fountain kid lazily washing glasses, the place was empty and quiet, except for a cluster of four young men - I guessed they were about seventeen or eighteen - encircling a young woman perched on a corner of the pool table. I’ve never been very good at guessing a woman’s age, a hazardous task, at best, for it is embarrassing to the woman, and to me, should I guess her older than she is. Suffice it to say that she was a most striking, beautiful woman. She was wearing a short sleeved, cream colored, low cut diaphanous blouse which, with each of her breaths, undulated softly over the contours of her bra free breasts. Quite an enchanting sight! Her hair, an iridescent blond, fell in soft ringlets to her shoulders. She was wearing white shorts which barely covered her thighs. Her legs and arms were well proportioned and firmly toned. She was wearing white moccasins. Even from my distance, approximately ten feet from her, my rapt attention most assuredly sharpened my vision, I could discern that her long lashed eyes were pools of deep blue, set over high cheekbones, that her nose was straight with a pert tip and her lips full and pomegranate red. And I could see that her young audience was as entranced by her as was I.

Each hung on her every word, smiled when she smiled, laughed when she did. Each was her captive. I, too, quickly became her captive. My desire for information to the nearest motel now forgotten, I pulled up a chair and sat down a few feet from where this Goddess like woman held her court. The rasp of my chair caught her ear. For a moment she looked away from her circle of acolytes, gazed languidly at me, then turned her attention back to those who were hanging onto her every word and gesture.

Have any of you gorgeous young men ever been in love? All laughed, and each sat up straight in his chair, as if preening himself at this glorious description of his physical charisma. But none answered her query. Surely, you young men have experienced the joys of sex, in one or more of its variations, ever since you discovered its pleasures when you first masturbated, am I not correct?

Her young audience uniformly blushed, looked sheepish, and each shuffled his feet as if recalling his first successful experiment in jerking off. None spoke up. No one wanted to admit before her the truth of her profound, yet blithely expressed observation. She waited for a response. Receiving none she then asked, Are sexual arousal, and its satisfaction, the same as seeking love and finding it?

This was clearly an easier question, for all four raised their hands. One of them, without waiting for any recognition from her, said, A guy can make it with a chick, and vice versa, without either being in love with the other.

Leaning forward, one leg suggestively swinging, our Goddess leaned forward, tapped the young man on his shoulder and noted that he was right. Flattered, he blushed. Thus, she continued, you’ve noted the distinction between sexual desire and that special feeling that people throughout the ages call ‘Love’. She went on. Her young audience, and I, now as much in her spell as they, leaned forward in our chairs, in rapt attention, all eyes on her beauty, all ears alert to her