A male Scheherazade

—“Now that I have another girl calling me ‘BobbaLew’,” I would say to my pretty lifeguard friend at Canandaigua’s YMCA swimming pool……
“I figgered you might wanna know how ‘BobbaLew’ came to be.”
That’s because a few years ago I told her the name I preferred was “BobbaLew,” which she now calls me.
“That’s a long story,” I would say. “‘BobbaLew’ goes back 60 years. I doubt I could compress my story into 60 seconds.”
But I noticed if I wanna tell a story, to anyone really, but especially females, they wanna hear the story — and right now.
That girl perceives I wanna spend time with her, sharing a story as it were.
She likes that, or seems to.
“Sometime I gotta tell you my elevator story,” I say.
SCREECH!
I get the look. She wants the story, and she wants it NOW!
“That other stuff can wait!”
I call this the male Scheherazade bit.
After discovering his first wife had been unfaithful, an Iranian sultan began marrying virgins as revenge.
He’d spend one night with ‘em, then behead ‘em the next morning so they couldn’t dishonor him.
Eventually his aide-de-camp, who supplied the virgins, ran out of virgins-of-noble-lineage, so the aide offered his daughter Scheherazade when she volunteered.
Scheherazade began telling a story to her sister, but stopped mid-story because it was dawning.
The king was enthralled; he wanted to hear the end of the story.
So he spared beheading her so she could finish the story the next night. After which she began another, also leaving it unfinished.
So the sultan spared her another beheading.
And on and on it went: 1,000 stories over 1,001 nights.
That king fell in love with Scheherazade and made her his queen.
I’m not beheading my lady friends, nor are they beheading me. I also am not having my way with them.
But I like telling ‘em stories. They seem to enjoy my spending time with them — entertaining them as it were.