Friends With Benefits

**Editors' Note: Today's guest post comes in from our semi-regular guest, Terry Tucker.**

This was an Internet date match-up. When I entered Starbuck’s I saw a man sitting at a table on the far side, wearing the jade-green, U-of-Oregon cap that so many men wear in these parts. Signs of French Canadian ancestry could be discerned in his fine, virile features. He had an oval-shaped head, dark eyes, olive complexion and sharply defined bone structure. His eyes held yours, though not in an unpleasant way.

He spoke in a manner not quite like ours, an indeterminate accent all his own. His manner was calm and relaxed, and he spoke in a very picturesque way, without gesticulation. He paused occasionally, and you felt that each phrase was being carefully constructed in the moment, not at all like the mindless, ready-made jargon we normally use in conversation. You quickly grasped that he had a gift of assembling words expressively.

It was unclear at first exactly what he did for a living; it hardly seemed to matter. He was well traveled and engaging, overflowing with zest. As it turned out, he was Algerian, not Canadian, with a French connection. He had a wide range of interest and something to say on every topic. To be with him was very agreeable

Things were developing nicely, when he began talking about a Private Stock Offering he was putting together for the construction of a Wind Farm on a South Dakota Indian reservation. The first-round financing was fully subscribed to, he said, but a way could be found to include me and my friends, if there was interest. Sounded so good, the way he put it. Friends with benefits. Might have gone for it if the Bernie Madoff scam was not so fresh in the memory. Maybe if he had waited until the second date to make the pitch.