Let Me Tell You a Tale

When people ask me about my husband, where we met, how long we have been together, how long we have known each other, etc., I give them a few lines from my comedy routine.

                “When I met my husband, he was slim, trim, with long curly dark hair past his shoulders.  He was a star football player, a straight-A student, and I didn’t stand a chance. The competition was all over him.   But I am a patient woman.  It took me thirty-two years, but I got him.  Of course, he’s fat, balding, deaf, and looks like Santa Claus, but he’s all mine!  Eat your heart out, girls!

                My daughter asked me a few years ago, ‘Do you think Dad is handsome?’  I told her, ‘Honey, when we go to bed at night, he takes out his hearing aids and thinks I’m the smartest woman in the world, and when I take off my glasses, he’s a college football player.”

                John just shakes his head at my jokes.  He tells me I was always beautiful and still am, and that there wasn’t any competition.  Little white lies are the secret to a happy marriage.

                I met John when I was eleven years old.  He remembers meeting me shortly after his family moved onto a farm just a few miles down the road from us.  I don’t remember meeting him that summer before sixth grade. John says he was impressed because I was throwing hay bales.  He made no impression on me.

His sister was a year younger than I, and we became good friends. Such good friends that at fourteen we ran away together to seek our fame and fortune.  We made it almost to Verndale.  The day before John and I married, I was joking with his sister that the two of us could skip the wedding and run away again.  Brenda pointed out that we would get much further now that we had a car.  But since we were already in Las Vegas, where else would we go?  Besides, I already had the gown. 

It was in sixth grade that John became my nemesis.  I was starting to realize boys were fundamentally and in a good way, different than girls.  But John was just annoying.  His last name being a C, he sat behind me, a B.  I was okay with that part.  It was his annoying behavior of knowing the answer to every question that really ticked me off.  That was my job.  It was the only claim to fame that I had, my brains.  Now this upstart city kid from New York was taking away my identity!

John said that he would sit at his desk during a test.  If I got up to argue a test question, he would follow and listen carefully.  If I were winning the argument, he would sit back down, but he was ready to take over if it looked like I was losing. Another example, he says, of “how I always had your back.”   More like, I carried him so long I got stretch marks.

In junior high, we were teased, “You two might as well marry and have brainy kids”, as though it was a given that the two nerds should breed.  I appreciated John’s looks, but his attitude still irked me.  In the classroom, John solved a problem on the chalkboard.  Dale Niskenen asked out loud, “Are you ever wrong?”  In an obviously sarcastic tone.  John paused, chalk in hand, and then said, “I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.”  The teacher thought it was hilarious.  From the disenfranchised wreckage of the bell curve, I snarled.

John’s sister Brenda, my cousin Kristy, and I became the dynamic trio, up to the time of Brenda's and my Great Adventure.   Joe, John’s little brother, was an annoying, much younger child and of absolutely no interest to anyone of our maturity.  John was just plain annoying.  Brenda was the only decent kid in the family to hang out with and ride bicycles all summer.

By high school, John had gone away to another city, leaving me to pick up the wreckage of my reputation as the smart kid.  Unfortunately, he had only encouraged the other kids in my grade, and I now had stiff competition.  Brenda switched school districts at her father’s request after our Great Adventure.   Time marches forward.

Thirty-two years later, I was living in McGill, NV, and Kristy, Brenda, and I were a trio again.  Thanks to social media, we had found each other despite our vastly different paths in life.  One had joined the Marines, one had become a wife and mother, and I had gone to college.  As no time had passed, we talked about marriage and babies and work and complained about deadbeat dads and stubborn children.

One evening, as Brenda and I chatted, she mentioned that she was worried about her brother John, so far away in Houston.  She was stuck at work and couldn’t be with him, and it was near the anniversary date of his wife’s death.  I told her, “Let me email him and see if he remembers me and wants to talk about memories of good ol’ Sebeka.  Maybe it will cheer him up a bit.”

I started out with the usual line, “You probably don’t remember me but…”

His response was instantaneous.  “Of course, I remember you.  You were the smartest girl in school!  You were Brenda’s friend, but you were so shy that you never talked to me.  I always tried to say hi to you, but you just ignored me.”

I explained how school bullying had taught me to be quiet and avoid contact with others.  Especially one of the popular boys.  He told me that he never understood why I was bullied so much.   I told him what I was doing now, and he talked about his life since we had last seen each other.

Soon we started talking on the phone.  Lilly would yell, “Hi John!” if she saw me talking to him.  Video chats included Lilly as well, although she was more interested in John’s cat, Keisha the Beast.  Keisha would walk across the keyboard and meow loudly to get attention, something Lilly found hilarious.  John told Lilly that Keisha had a time-out cage, her cat carrier, when she was being bad.  Lilly giggled and giggled, and it became routine for John to fill Lilly in on the adventures of “the beast” as they both called her. 

After a few months, John invited me to visit Houston.  It was August 12^th when I first touched down in Houston, Texas.  My glasses fogged on the walkway from the heat and humidity.  I was used to Nevada, but Houston had a new level of heat.  It was like standing inside a cloud, while somehow being engulfed in flames. The intense green was a shock to my desert-accustomed brain.  

John was waiting in the limo pick-up line outside the airport.  He had dropped off a customer before picking me up and was wearing his suit and tie.  I still wonder what the other limo passengers thought of us.  It was a dramatic greeting between a driver and a passenger. 

Leaving the airport, John and I went on our first real date.  It was the most romantic me-centered date I had ever been on in my life.  John took me to three separate bookstores in his neighborhood.  Trust him to live near bookstores.  He had me at “book”. 

A few months later, John came up to Nevada to meet Lilly, Bingo Bunny, and Ozzy the cat.  He loved the mountains and low humidity, and he loved me.  We agreed to move in together and then skipped right to planning the wedding.

Both of us were married before, me unsuccessfully for eight years, him very successfully for 25 years. We were combining two full households and didn’t want a huge wedding.  We chose the Graceland Chapel in Las Vegas, the “Elvis Package,” and set about telling family and friends. 

We decided to make it fun for the people we loved.  Grandma Bonnie was very sick and was unable to attend.  She loved Elvis and would have been thrilled with the impersonator.  I made sure to get a video for her to watch the wedding, as Elvis walked me down the aisle, singing, “Wise men say…”  

My ex-in-laws served as witnesses at our wedding and held our reception at their house.  The ceremony had ended with Elvis singing “Viva Las Vegas,” and Lilly had danced along.  She didn’t know any other words, so she ran around singing “Viva Las Vegas” all afternoon. 

My ex-in-laws gifted us a stay on the Las Vegas Strip, where we met up with Brenda, her son Scott, and John’s brother Joe on Fremont Street.  Scott, Joe, and John rode the zipline high above Fremont as Brenda and I stood firmly on the ground, shaking our heads.

“Story of my life,” I told Brenda.  “Guy marries me, next thing he tries to kill himself.”

“There’s no way I’m going up there, they are crazy,” Brenda told me.

“No way,” I agreed, “I would crap myself all over the tourists.”

It was the weekend of May 28^th, which we picked because it was close to Memorial Day, so we had a chance of remembering the date. Driving home after the weekend, Lilly sat in the backseat for the four-hour drive (not counting potty breaks).

“Viva Las Vegas,” Lilly sang over and over.  I desperately wished I had a copy of the song so she could at least learn more of the words.  But no, Lilly sang for four hours the only words to what was now her favorite song, “Viva Las Vegas”.

Yeah, it took thirty-two years, but he is mine now.  Thank you, God, Baruch Hashem.