It is August 31 – a day that always makes me smile. Through a few grateful tears.
It was on this date, now 25 years ago, that I timidly, anxiously, knocked on Lori Alexander’s door to pick her up for a date. Later, we would refer to it as our “first date,” but on that particular evening it was merely a date. There were to be no sequels. It was a “one-off” obligatory outing to which both of us had agreed in order to get Phyllis, our erstwhile matchmaker, off our respective backs. We had met at a wedding almost a year before, but life and complications had prevented any trailing interaction. Until that subsequent August when I finally got up the courage – or suspended my resistance – and called.
Calling, of course, wasn’t a simple matter. After numerous attempts and getting no answer, I finally and reluctantly left a message. “You probably don’t remember me, but…” She had been screening her calls, but courteously called me back. We talked. We chuckled at Phyllis’ persistence. In the course of it all, Lori gently but firmly made it clear when accepting my clumsy invitation that, what with starting a new job and trying to finish a PhD (and, I was to learn sometime later, a general weariness with romantic entanglements), that she wasn’t “interested in a relationship.” Myself recently divorced, I breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing I needed was a relationship. And the last thing I could afford. I was utterly broke – able to pay the rent on a humble apartment only through the supportive and charitable largesse of my parents. Weeks shy of 40, and I was dependent on handouts from my parents. It was, indeed, a bleak and precarious time that made no allowance, psychologically or financially, for dating. And yet here I was driving a beautiful and evocative young woman to a restaurant that I must have searched between the sofa cushions for coins to pay for.
Let’s just say that it had been a long time since I had been on a date. I was awkward; equal parts tongue-tied and blathering. I remember, in response to some probing, “get-acquainted” question, mentioning how much I love words, and how they can paint images. To her credit, she didn’t immediately ask to be taken home. In fact, the evening extended. The server cleared our plates and refilled our water glasses. Again and again. Over two hours later we departed the restaurant and I dropped her back off at her apartment.
There are no accompanying pictures. As I say, it was to have been a one-time, forgettable event – the kind that neither warrants nor provokes photography. Which is fine with me, because I recall the mental image just now with a smile and more clarity than any picture could contain – the two of us at that table-for-two in that dimly lit restaurant; her in her navy shorts and me in my khaki pants, talking and smiling; first hesitantly and awkwardly and then with increasing ease and vigor and enjoyment. I called my brother the following day and confessed, “I’ve had a way better time than I really wanted to have at this point in my life.”
Indeed. A “way better time” that continues to this day.
We will return to that dimly lit restaurant tonight, as we have on this night each of the ensuing years; reliving and celebrating now for the 25th time that single, one-off date that in the alchemy of love became, for us, a “first date.”
We will no doubt have words to speak; words that will paint images of both memory and imagination. Memory, because we have made them aplenty. Imagination, because, of course, this will hardly be the last.
