March 28, 2014 Scenes from our life: “Don’t lick the car.”-My wife to my son yesterday on our way out to dinner. On March 28th, 2004 it had been 86 years since the Red Sox had last won a world series. American Idol and Two and a Half Men were both in their premier seasons and it was still three years before the first iphone would come out. On a personal level, I had just turned forty, was mostly unemployed and finally gave into baldness by shaving my head for the first time. I was also newly single, just out of a marriage that had spent so much time on the rocks it should have had a drink named after it. I had moved back to Boston from Chicago, where my first wife and I had made one last attempt at hitting our heads on the concrete wall of our relationship before realizing it would feel much better if we both just stopped. SFOL: Yesterday I came home from work and my daughter was inside the refrigerator cleaning the shelves with a baby wipe. Mandie was a friend from softball and somewhat younger than me. I had run into her near the Prudential Center the previous Christmas Eve while I was waiting for my then wife to complete a four hour hair appointment on Newbury Street. Mandie had just gone through the traumatic loss of a friend. I saw her coming out of an outdoor market and went over to talk to her. She swears she saw me first and tried to avoid me, but we ended up spending a couple of hours walking around Boylston Street. We talked a lot. I employed my infinite old guy wisdom and told her that life always gets better and I felt like I helped her a little. SFOL: “That’s a humongous tree Daddy!”-Zekey to me last Sunday on our bike ride. Three months later my friend Andrew called Mandie and told him I was back in town and that she had a chance to return the “life will get better” conversation. She met me at the Sail Loft on a Sunday afternoon. We had some of the world’s best chowder and a couple of Guinness. After some initial awkwardness we got into the subject of what she was looking for in a partner. There’s a scene in “Ground Hog Day” where Bill Murray asks Andie MacDowell what she’s looking for in a perfect guy. Her first requirement is that “he’s too humble to know he’s perfect.” Bill Murray pauses, then says, “That’s me.” He responds to each of her requirements the same way. As Mandie listed what she was looking for that scene played through my head. I hit almost everything except the musician and long-hair requirements. “He needs to be older.” “He doesn’t need to be Jewish, but he needs to understand it.” “He needs to understand the loss of a parent at relatively young age.” Me, me and also me. In my mind I hit several other “must haves” and at some point “a couple of beers with a friend” began to evolve into something else. SFOL: The first thing I saw when I came home the other day was a grilled cheese sandwich in the living room window. Nobody was home. From the Sail Loft we went to dinner in the North End, then drinks at the Four Winds. After about an eight hour conversation there was an extremely awkward kiss good night. Then some phone calls, then a second date and some baseball games. A cat, moving in together, a ring, a wedding, two children and three Red Sox World Series championships and ten years has gone by in the blink of an eye. Tonight we have a sitter coming over and we are headed to the Sail Loft and the North End. We’ll have a drink at the Four Winds and probably be home by 10:30. Tomorrow we have sports and two birthday parties and we will go back to our regular lives, but tonight we celebrate March 28th, which is a more important to us than our wedding date, which neither of us can ever remember accurately. I am a lucky man, married, correctly this time, to the girl of my dreams. We’ve had many more ups than downs during our first decade and, hopefully, tonight she’ll pick up my option for the next ten years. SFOL: The other day she sent me this text: Your son is a whiny sac and your daughter is a (deleted for family viewing). Can’t wait.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 21:36:42 +0000
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