She was just twenty at the time. He was fifteen years older. I learned about their new romance in a phone call that September and I didn't like it one bit. Just a few months earlier I'd had to absorb the news that my youngest daughter had dropped out of college. Now this.

"And he's a truck driver?" I tried unsuccessfully to hide my dismay.

"Well, Mom, he's only doing it to support his two children, but he's actually a writer."

Oh, a 35-year-old divorced-dad truck driver who scribbled in his spare time. Even better. What quirk of fate had arranged a charged encounter between my little Arwen and this trucker at a North Carolina folk festival?

Then came the CV. The truck driver, Jack, was working on his PhD. in Classics, had a fellowship year in Florence under his belt, and claimed a decent command of both Italian and French. The floor to ceiling bookshelves of his--their--three-room cabin in western North Carolina housed "everything you could ever want to read," according to his young inamorata, in the way of American and European literature, history, and philosophy, and even (she added smugly for my benefit) the writings of Rudolph Steiner, founder of the Waldorf School movement, of which my daughter was a product.

A cascade of details followed. Jack played fiddle for old-time contra dances, had taught college-level Greek and Latin, supplemented his trucker income with construction jobs, had edited the first issue of a new periodical celebrating Appalachian culture, and was polishing a collection of short stories for publication. As I listened to Arwen's breathless recital of this eclectic assemblage of data, I found myself reassembling, just a little, the image I'd formed of the man who had attracted my daughter. Divorced-dad trucker was morphing into backwoods Renaissance man--even allowing for spirited embellishment. My barriers dropped an inch. But who was this guy, really?

Ironically, it was Jack's job as a trucker that brought about our meeting a few months later. I phoned Arwen from Maine with early New Year greetings: her stepfather Dave and I were about to leave for the annual New Year's Eve "dawn" dance in Mount Hermon, Mass. No! Jack would be at that very same dance, Arwen gasped. He had a load to deliver practically next door in White River Junction, Vermont. Her excited disbelief shot through the wires, mixed with the dawning distress that we would be meeting Jack without her. I remembered how often I'd been swayed by the force of her manipulative introductions to men I knew in my heart to be charming rakes. Although I hadn't seen her for months, I felt relieved.

Driving west on snow packed roads from Portland, I thought about the apparent end to the middle-class expectations I'd had for my daughter. Years earlier, the first in my family to graduate, college had been a hard-won subway commute, and those four years a privilege I never would have played with. Arwen had barely lasted two years at the small Quaker college that, to its credit, had bent over backwards to help her. Most of that time she'd been on academic probation, spending her energy singing in a student folk band and rustling up gigs in local clubs. She'd hitched rides on weekends to fiddle workshops or any folk festival she could find within a hundred miles of her Indiana campus. Her friendships were legion, her loyalties intense. She read voraciously (Lolita was one of her favorites, I recalled uneasily) and penned journals, poems, and stories. Her math skills, on the other hand, were abysmal; time management was a foreign concept. She rarely turned in class assignments in anything that didn't interest her. Was it any surprise she'd opted for a romantic out? Still, did it have to be a cradle-snatching trucker with literary pretensions? Would he look bearded and greasy? Wispy and inbred?

Arwen's description of Jack's physical appearance had, in fact, been brief: tall and thin. Beyond that--well, I would recognize him, she'd said. I considered her words as Dave and I stashed our boots and parkas among the chaotic jumble of similar garments lining the dance floor. The packed-hall excitement of an all-night New England contra dance, live Celtic and French-Canadian jigs and reels bouncing off the stage, buoyed me--but didn't ease my search.

Two hours later I had seen many tall, thin men, all of whom I had eliminated according to criteria I couldn't quite analyze. I, too, was beginning to sense I would recognize this man--if I could ever find him. Arwen, never one to withhold revelations of Mom's bourgeois 1950's values to amused peers, had already relayed my qualms to her new sweetie, she'd assured me. And although of course he wasn't exactly her peer, he wasn't mine either. Was he in fact dreading our encounter and even now hiding out in the men's room? Which of my post-Victorian strictures was he fearing? Did he imagine I was going to demand a statement of his intentions?

Then, as the musicians tuned after a break and the caller announced the next dance I saw someone new. Tall and thin, a black beret covering up whatever hair he had. Smallish, rimless glasses. Black, button-down shirt and jeans. The narrow, angled thinker's face looked out quizzically, bemusedly at the crowd, at one with the music and yet apart from it. I knew I'd had my first sight of Jack.

"Lee," he exclaimed when the dance ended, just as sure of my identity as I was of his. Expecting reserve, I detected warmth in his greeting. I actually found myself smiling just a little as we shook hands and I introduced him to my husband. At that point Dave tactfully withdrew; we both knew that this first conversation needed to be just between Jack and me. Ready for respectful sparring, the two of us staked out a corner of the dance floor. We didn't leave it for three hours.

My protective resistance didn't take long to surface but it was anger over Arwen's discarded formal education, not her mountain love nest, that first burst forth from me. Jack listened well. Despite his own achievements, he said gently, he was convinced that college was mostly a waste of time and antithetical to real education.

Which is?" I began combatively.

"Life and reading," he answered simply. I disagreed. We argued with heat (mine) and with humor (his), with Jack maintaining that Arwen had already extracted the best that college had to offer her, and I that a degree was still worth something in the job market, as Jack's M.A. proved--well, sort of.

I'm not sure how it happened, but after a while it seemed we had more interesting things to talk about. Music: Blues and bluegrass on fiddle and guitar for Jack; Flemish and English Renaissance on recorder for me. Books: Faulkner, James, Homer. "The greatest anti-war poem," Jack declared of The Iliad, and I couldn't disagree. He spoke of his concerns and hopes for his young son and daughter, I of mine for my children--not just the child in question. We described our favorite places in the world. At some point I realized I'd stopped feeling like a defensive mother.

Still, we couldn't evade the relationship issue. Jack was as conscious as I of the difference in their ages and experience. I could see he knew Arwen well already: her strengths, her weaknesses, her eccentricities. He shared her passion for solitude, he said; he appreciated her vegetarian cooking skills. He even wanted to know what she'd been like at five, at ten, at thirteen: requests I responded to with, I realized afterward, unaccustomed finesse. By 7:00 a.m. when the dance ended and we said goodbye, I found myself astonished by my dawning relief that I'd just met an extremely decent human being; that my daughter was in good hands; that maybe I should just chill out and be happy for her.

Two months later Jack was again headed north to deliver a load, this time to Bangor. He telephoned us from Portsmouth, and two hours later he, Dave, and I were enjoying eggplant Parmesan and a Sicilian red in the kitchen--and there was another evening of non-stop talk, this time with the three of us. Before he left around midnight, Jack took out his fiddle and played some of the lovely Appalachian dance tunes he'd known since childhood. He was teaching them to Arwen, he said.

I knew then that their relationship was going to be no fast affair, though Jack acknowledged even then that it wouldn't last a lifetime. "I have to stay where I am while my children grow up," he told us, "but she'll have to go forward at some point to meet her future, whatever it is." Right now, he seemed to be saying, was the space and time in which they could both give to and learn from each other.

My friendship with Jack prospered after that first meeting on the dance floor. As any mother would, I'd feared my barely twenty-year-old daughter had met someone who only wanted to take advantage of her youth--but I was mistaken. Not only in my preconceived notions about Jack, I realized, but in my thinking about Arwen. She wasn't a child anymore; she had matured into a young woman who could be trusted to choose a lover wisely.

It's been fifteen years since that winter. Arwen and Jack stayed together for five of those years, until she left him and the backwoods for Seattle, where she's now a successful entrepreneur, performer, and home owner. She never went back to college--but then again, she's never needed that degree anyway.