A Valentine's Day Special: How I Met My Girlfriend

June 26, 2010. I'd spent most of the day cleaning house and making chicken salad. That evening John and I got in the car and went to Midtown to hang out with Jen and James.

(Every time I say "Jen and James" around my friend Laurie she always says "you were hanging out with Jenna Jameson?" because ha ha pornstars!)

(An aside: for a couple of weeks before this I'd had a profile on a dating website called okcupid. Why was I on this website? Because it was free and, as I'd explained to both Laurie and James, "I'm not real interested in dating, but I'm interested in doing some of the things people do when they date. If you know what I mean. And I mean having sex." I'd talked to a couple of women from this website, but I hadn't met anyone I was too excited about. I did send a little hi-how-are-ya note to a certain blonde, though. Keep reading.)

So I'm sitting on Jen and James' couch and we're shooting the shit about the World Cup and most likely drinking beer and eating chicken salad. I ask Jen if I can use her computer to check Facebook. She said yes.

And there was a friend request. It was from a name that meant nothing to me...put the picture was a little bit familiar...so I looked at the profile...and thought about it for a little while...

And then I remembered! It was the blonde! From okcupid! Her name was Gretchen. I accepted the friend request.

And she was online, so we started talking. She explained that she'd searched for my name (which she got from okcupid - it was on my profile) on Facebook, but she wasn't stalking me or anything. I assured her I didn't think she was stalking me.

It was a fun talk. Funny and flirty and semi-dirty. I explained that I was separated, heading for divorce, one kid, two dogs, all that. She told me some stuff about her. At one point I slid across James' living room on my knees like a soccer player who's just scored the winning goal. This girl was cute! And interested in me! And at the very least moderately filthy!

I got her phone number. I got home late that night, put John in bed, and called her. I would later learn that Gretchen is not a late-stayer-upper. But we chatted for a bit and decided we'd get together and do something soon.

So that was nice!

The next morning I'm getting ready for church. I get a text message. The talk went something like this:

Her: Whatcha doing?
Me: Getting ready for church.
Her: Oh how interesting. Where do you go to church?
Me: First Congo. It's very hippie-dippie-lovie-feely-touchy.
Her: I've always meant to go to First Congo.
Me: Well you should go today.
Her: Well okay I will. See you there.

Now, on the fourth Sunday of each month First Congo does a thing called Food For Families. Nothing fancy, they just box up a ton of donated food and give it out to people who need it. It does require some unskilled labor the morning they do it, and I help with that. So I was unloading and bagging up fifty pound bags of...onions? Potatoes? One of the two. Whichever one it was, some of them were rotten and extra-stanky. So, by the time Food For Families was all set up I was sweaty and lightly glazed with rotten vegetables. I went to the bathroom and rinsed off as best I could.

And a few minutes later Gretchen walked in.

Was it love at first sight? I don't think so. I'm a little too old to believe in such things. She was awfully good-looking, though, which never hurts. And she was funny, with a quick smile, and some truly striking green eyes. I liked her immediately.

So, yes: our first date was at church. With my kid. Romance!

After church we walked over to the Deli. Gretchen gave John quarters for video games, which made him automatically think well of her. I was distracted by her cleavage, and told her so. She took it well.

Afterwards John and I walked her to her car - a black Mini convertible. It was as perfect a match of car to person as I'd ever seen. I gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Success!

John and I went swimming at my sister's house that afternoon, and he was snoozing by the time we got home. Gretchen had been called in to work that night. When she got off, she gave me a call. I invited her over. She came.

We sat on the couch for a couple of hours and talked. Lots of deep dark secrets revealed, all that. And made out a little bit, like you do. Nothing your average high school couple wouldn't do, though.

The next day she sent me a text. She had the day off. Would I like to have lunch? I said yes. It was the first time I'd seen her in shorts. She had - and has - fairly amazing legs. Good to know!

Back at work she laid a big wet kiss on my before she dropped me off.

"Well," I thought, "some of my coworkers might wonder who that was." But no one said anything.

The next night John was off with his mom. I called Gretchen to see if she wanted to go get some sushi or a drink or something. She had to go to bed fairly early, though, so she asked me to come over to her place and hang out for a while. I did. We had a good time.

On the way home, Queen's Somebody To Love came on the radio. I sang, loudly and badly, the windows down, me trying (and failing) to hit all the notes as I crossed the bridge.

As the song ended, I had a thought.

If this girl isn't crazy, or at least not crazy in any bad, horrible way, I thought, then this could be something really good.

[Obviously, I'm in a summertime mood today. It might have something to do with the cold and rain of a dismal February day. February! The most useless month!]

June 2009. Late on a Friday afternoon, I was floating in a pool at a condo in Orlando. The ex and the ex in-laws and John and I were all playing in the pool. I was on vacation, so I was about half-drunk on Bud Light. Floating on my back, I was watching the sunset play over the clouds in the near-tropical Central Florida sky.

And there were birds. Lots of birds! Flying in a stream over the pool. More and more birds as it got darker. A rushing river of birds moving across the sky.

But the individual birds were erratic, flying this way and that, even as the whole flock kept moving in the same general direction. And, as it got darker, they seemed to be flying lower, and closer to the streetlights dotted around the clubhouse in the middle of the parking lot.

And there was something strange about their wings...

I stood up in the pool.

"Hey, John," I said, "I think those are bats."

He looked up. "Wow, daddy. That's a lot of bats."

So we watched as millions of bats made the night come that much faster, not far from the Magic Kingdom.

Late July, 2010. Gretchen and I have been dating about a month. We were on our first trip together - tubing down the Current River in Missouri. It was going very well.

It was blisteringly hot - well over 100 degrees - and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The water in the Current River was cold - it's always cold - so floating in a tube, with your ass in the water, was pretty much the perfect way to stay comfortable.

We were on a deserted stretch of the river. No one was in sight ahead or behind. Gretchen undid her top and got some more sun. I opened another beer.

"You," I said, "are a pretty excellent girlfriend."

She smiled at me. "I didn't even realize I was applying for the position."

"And yet you have it."

A little while later Gretchen took a lighter out of a dry-bag. It exploded in her hand before she could light her cigarette. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Lines from a song Morrissey never wrote:

[jangly guitars]

"Middle aged lady with a rat-tail
Why is your ass so large?
Your camo cargo pants are such a mistake
You know you're not in chaaaaaaarge...."

It was probably about twenty years ago. I was in college, and home for some holiday in the winter - Thanksgiving, Christmas, something like that. For some reason, it was just me and my grandmother in the car, driving from my sister's apartment downtown to my mom's house in West Memphis.

I think we were talking relationships, and maybe about my sister and her boyfriend, and would they get married or not. I hadn't been married that long then, and my grandmother had been married to my grandfather for fifty years before he died in 1984. I thought of my grandmother as a pretty good source of relationship advice in general, and marriage advice in particular.

So we gossiped and talked and kept coming back to the fact that you have to care about someone a great deal to put up with the things they do that drive you crazy. And no matter how good the relationship is, there will be some things that drive you crazy.

Now, my grandmother was not a woman to use strong language, except for a muttered "shit!" when something didn't go quite right - burned cake, bad hand of cards, things like that.

But she looked out the car window that day, shook her head, and sighed.

"You have to love someone an awful lot," she concluded, "to put up with their shit." That sounded like wisdom gained from hard-earned experience to me. I've never forgotten it.

She would have been 95 today. Not a day goes by I don't think about her.

When I was a junior in high school, the principal (who had a couple of kids who were in high school, too) would sometimes have a sort of open house thing on Friday nights after a home football game. There would be snacks and Pictionary and things like that. All very straightforward and innocent, but fun. I suppose he thought it would keep a few kids from going out drinking and screwing, and he was probably right. I went a few times and enjoyed myself.

One Friday night after a football game I went riding around with my friends Jon and Edwin. It was a stylish ride, too, because on that night Edwin had borrowed his dad's great big van. Not a minivan, but a full sized van with captain's chairs and a booming stereo and all that. It was known as The Party Van.

Sadly, the party wasn't to be had that night. I specifically remember us parking in front of the Walgreen's in West Memphis, trying to snag someone that a) was of age, and b) would buy us something to drink. We tried. Well, Ed and Jon tried. I didn't know anyone. Eventually, though, we gave up and decided to go to the thing at the principal's house.

We got there, and everyone was hanging out in the kitchen, yapping and drinking Coke and horking down Poncho's dip. It was a good scene, and totally parent-acceptable, too. Out late on a Friday night, hanging with a bunch of friends, at the principal's house. No one could criticize that!

Now, for some reason I wasn't really feeling it that night. I kind of think I was pining over some girl, but this is going on twenty-five years ago. I can't really remember. But I know I was kind of hanging back and being quiet. Who knows why? Teenagers are moody bitches.

Also at the gathering was this other guy - whom we'll call Jim. Jim was a year older than me, like Jon and Ed. I didn 't really have an opinion about Jim. I didn't know him and didn't hang out with him. He was just another big lug. The gossip of the day said that Jim had quite a crush on one of the principal's daughters.

(Also: I've seen Jim a couple of times in last few years. He looks exactly like one of the cops Ralph Steadman drew for Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [see illustration, right]. This delights me more than I can say. Sadly, no one else I bring it up with gets the reference.)

Anyway, Jim pulls me aside.

"Y'all have got a lot of nerve, coming in here drunk."

What to say? I hadn't had anything to drink all night. Neither had Jon nor Ed. We'd certainly wanted something, and Jon and Ed showing up at a semi-official school function after a few drinks would have been absolutely par for the course. But it didn't happen.

My first response, of course, was shut your gob and screw off, you don't know what you're talking about. But Jim was not only a big guy, he was a big guy with a crush on a girl. No doubt, he thought it might impress her to bust someone for drinking. And he might get a commendation from her dad!

I knew even then, as a teenager, that there was no chance in trying to talk sense to a teenager. I just shook my head and walked away. Let him try and prove it. Which he couldn't do.

The evening continued without incident.

To recap the holidays: Christmas was good! A big food-and-drink-and-merrymaking thing at my sister's house on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Gretchen gave me a bottle of Blanton's on Christmas Eve; I drank too much of it and got teary-eyed at the end of It's A Wonderful Life.

New Year's, John and I shot fireworks, and a few people came over that evening. Then Gretchen and I laid around in our pajamas all day Sunday, watching football. It was glorious.

And for MLK Day I cleaned house and John and I worked with Legos. Then I went over to Gretchen's for leftover pizza and Gosford Park.

Related: On Tuesday night I watched the first three episodes of Downton Abbey. Butlers! Rich people! Cattiness! Wit!