Love and Marriage and Burger King

“How long have you known Mom?”  It was just us guys.  Daniel and I were midway through dinner, our weekly foray into fast food.  He chose Burger King over Tom and Jerry’s and we were splitting up an order of mozzarella sticks.

“I’ve known Mom since 1997,” I replied.  Meka and I started sending e-mails back and forth that November.

“How long did it take before you fell in love?”  I set down my Diet Coke to give it some thought.  We went back and forth for a few months on-line.  One night Meka drank enough courage with a friend of hers to give me a call.  Unfortunately it was the night my brother was killed.  Somehow – despite that – we decided to get together.  Meka was visiting a childhood friend in Chicago and stopped by my area the day after Valentine’s Day, 1998.  While it wasn’t love at first sight, I knew by the end of the day that she was The One.  Daniel did the math.

“So you knew each other for three months and then fell in love in one day?”  I nodded.  “And you got married that day?”

I shook my head and swallowed a bit of Whopper.  “No, we didn’t get married for another year and a half,” I said.  Daniel almost did a spit take with his Hi-C Orange.

“A year and a half?!” he exclaimed.  “But I thought you loved each other!”

“Well, it wasn’t that simple,” I said.  “There’s more to it than just falling in love.  We had to get to know each other and figure out if we could have a life together.  That took time.”  Daniel looked more and more dismayed at this prospect.

“I’m going to have to wait two years to marry the girl of my dreams?” he said more to himself.  “Even if I’m Mr. Right?”  I wiped the corners of my mouth with a napkin and tossed it in Daniel’s Kid’s Meal bag.  I made a mental note to block every TV channel on our satellite except for C-SPAN when we got home.

“Well, ‘love is like a flower, you’ve got to let it grow’,” I said, quoting John Lennon.  “Besides if you’re going to get married, you’ll probably want to wait until you’re at least twelve.”

The Like Peace People Experience

I put on Monterrey Pop while Daniel was finishing up dessert.  It’s a documentary film of the 1967 Monterrey International Pop Festival and features a number of classic musical acts like The Who and the Mamas and the Papas.  It was broadcast in high definition and I was looking forward to being able to see the individual broken blood vessels in Jimi Hendrix’s eyes.  I sat on the couch to watch the opening moments with young women wearing colorful clothes getting their faces painted with words like “LOVE”.

From behind me I heard, “It’s the Like Peace People!”

I had to ask.

Daniel explained to me that back in the 1970’s (close enough; he was born in 1999 after all) there were a lot of people who wore funny clothes, they walked around with their eyes half closed and their fingers in “V” signs and said “Like, Peace, Man”.  His impression was dead on.  He sounded just like a Cheech and Chong album played at the wrong speed.  I asked him what he thought ‘peace’ meant.

Daniel thought a moment.  “I think they wanted to stop the angry mobs,” he said.  What angry mobs?  “They didn’t want black people to vote,” he explained.  Simon and Garfunkel were playing at Monterrey and Daniel asked me if they were the Beatles.  He sat down on the couch next to me and we had a little talk about Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement.  I was happy to hear he knew about some of it.  Daniel knew who Dr. Martin Luther King was and he told me about how black people could only ride on the back of the bus and there were different drinking fountains for white people and colored people.  He just didn’t get that.

“What if you got a tan?” he asked.  “What drinking fountain would you use?”  Good point; it probably took a kid to point out just how stupid segregation was.  We got to the highlight of the movie.  Jimi Hendrix was introduced and ran his guitar through five minutes of sonic feedback.

Daniel laughed, “He makes it sound like a car!”  Akane – our rental parrot – didn’t seem to care much for the Experience.  She fluffed up and mimicked the microwave.  We turned the sound up.  “I think he’s going to smash his guitar,” shouted Daniel over the ululating squeals of “Wild Thing”.  “That’s what the rock stars do on Sponge Bob.”  I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone who isn’t familiar with Jimi Hendrix, but – yes – he does smash his guitar.  However, Daniel wasn’t impressed.

“I liked the singing,” said Daniel, “but then he turned it into entertainment.”  I asked if he would have liked it better if Jimi Hendrix hadn’t set the guitar on fire.  Daniel looked at me as if I were nuts.

“Well, yeah,” he said, “guitars cost 300 dollars!”  He added, “They don’t grow on trees, you know.”

Wake Up Call

I love being able to wake up naturally. It’s my favorite type of sleep. To me, it feels warm; like you’ve been held in a long embrace. The world is dim and bathed in shades of gray. As I slowly raise my level of awareness, color bleeds into the room and I yawn and stretch, maybe go back to sleep a bit more.

But a few weeks ago, as I floated up towards the surface, I became aware of a voice. It seemed to be concerned, yet excited. I couldn’t make out the words at first, and even as I started to grasp the meaning of some of them, they didn’t seem to make any sense. It seemed like the voice was really concerned about the level of… fecal matter in my colon.

I had fallen asleep in my motel room with ESPN on and unfortunately it was one of those paid programming shows kicking off at 5:00 in the morning. As I came to, I realized two things.

1) Who wants to know about the amount of fecal matter left in their colon at 5:00 in the morning?

2) Who wants to know about the amount of fecal matter left in their colon… ever?

I really dislike sleeping in motels. I usually ask for a room with two beds; I can combine the two to make one halfway decent pile of pillows and blankets. The rooms sound wrong. I hear cars outside and bumps in the hallway. The heater / air-conditioner rattles when it kicks on. I miss the low moans of the distant trains going through downtown Belvidere. I like the occasional growl of the trucks using their air brakes on Route 20 that runs near our home.

And I really miss my wife.

I don’t usually touch her when I’m asleep, but there’s this warm spot on my right side that helps me go to sleep at night. She moves and the mattress shifts. And – occasionally, when neither of us has to get up with the pterodactyl shriek of our mutual alarm clocks – I wake up slowly and feel her arm laying over my side or this soft bundle of hair piled on my chest.

Compare that to waking up with Dr. Fecal-Matter, there really is no comparison.

 

Love Across the Miles

It was my first overnight trip away from my family since – well, since I had gotten a family. I was off to Las Vegas to attend a GoldMine Forum for a few days. I have to admit that the first day was fun. I learned a lot, I hung out with my co-workers, we went to dinner, I watched the Olympics from my bed and went to sleep.

The next day was more of the same and – frankly – I found myself feeling a little lonely. I decided to get out of the casino and take a walk outside. It was clear and cool with a bit of a breeze. Las Vegas is not the greatest location to stargaze; only the full moon was visible in all the lights.

That gave me a thought.

I called home from the parking lot of the Boulder Station casino. Meka answered on the first ring.

“I want you to go outside,” I said.

There was a long pause. “Okay.”

“Look up,” I said. “Do you see the moon?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m looking at the moon too.” I thought it was romantic. Here we were, a thousand miles away or more, but we could both be together in spirit, looking at the same moon.

“All right,” Meka said flatly. “Is that it?”

This wasn’t the reaction I was expecting.

We were still in that gooey afterglow of newlyweds. We still sent each other cards and wrote little smoochy e-mails to one another… even though we were in the same house.

“Well,” I stammered, “I just thought that – you know – we’re apart, but still together looking at the same moon…”

I got a sigh. “It’s ten below zero here,” she said. “I’d feel more romantic if I wasn’t freezing out here on the driveway.” She hung up, leaving me to the moon and a bunch of parked cars in Las Vegas in early February. As I walked back to my room in my short sleeve shirt, it dawned on me that love is blind… and also kind of clueless at times.