Today's vintage selection is another brief, beautiful prose piece that offers a small glimpse of a much larger picture. Get your creative juices flowing and fill in your own details surrounding the circumstances of Marilyn Abildskov's "Of the First," which appeared in our Winter/Spring 2001 issue, DB 2, and is still highly deserving of your attention more than a decade later. "I remember the first dinner with my first married man. I’d made soup that tasted decidedly bland and a spinach salad, because I knew he had never eaten spinach raw, and even though the meal was mediocre at best, I ate with great gusto and pleasure and enjoyed the feeling of this man watching me as if in his watching he were satiating a body that up till now had been ravenous." Marilyn Abildskov is a creative writer and professor of her craft at St. Mary's College of California. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and other honors, Abildskov's short stories, poetry, and essays have been widely published. Her travel memoir, The Men in My Country, was published by The Sightline Books Series of The University of Iowa Press. To see what Abildskov is up to recently, check out her tagged posts on St. Mary's website. Click here to immerse yourself in "Of the First"