Far from being chivalric romances, these stories vividly illustrate real people in love, real people like all of us. The characters in this assemblage get by as best they can in often humorous and always poignant ways. Among the characters are -an idealistic eleven-year-old with a gift for pencil drawing and a crush on his teacher -a forty-seven-year-old real estate agent looking for another ego-bolstering bedpost notch -a beautiful, lonely young woman whose only knowledge of love comes from classical literature and her mother's dire warnings about nasty things boys seek.