Conversation with My Wife (54)
You must remember this / A kiss is just… something to worry about when it’s the first time and you’ve gotten through the entire date without screwing up SO FAR…
ME: So I’m responding to a poetry prompt on Medium. It’s—
DEB: Is this like the one-word poetry prompts? I like those.
ME: Yes, but a different group.
ME: They want a poem on “Your First Kiss.” Initially I took it as second person singular, except I couldn’t come up with enough interesting about it, even in prose, so now rather than my first kiss I’m thinking about our first kiss, second person plural. You remember it?
DEB: (silence for a couple seconds)
ME: Okay, don’t think too har—
DEB: Of course I remember it. It was the end of our first date. You brought me home after dinner and a walk by the river, and I wouldn’t let you in.
ME: Which was fine with me, because the date had gone well.
DEB: And it was a school night.
ME: And I was going to see you back at work in a few hours anyway.
DEB: So I was thinking everything had been perfect. The romantic dinner with the view of the river, the walk by the river with the honeysuckle in bloom.
ME: The stupid flashlight.*
DEB: And when I’d used the ladies room before we left the restaurant, the older woman in there told me they were there to celebrate their anniversary, and she thought you and I looked so much in love, so she asked if we were there to celebrate anything, and I told her it was our first date…
ME: (heard this before) Uh-huh!
DEB: …and I thought we would end up getting married.
ME: (this is news) What?
DEB: I told her I thought we’d end up getting married.
ME: Eighteen years later, you’re just getting around to mentioning that part?
DEB: So then when you dropped me off, I wasn’t worried about you kissing me. I knew everything had been perfect, and our first kiss was going to be perfect. What were you thinking?
ME: I was thinking everything had been perfect up until now,** so I was worried I was going to screw things up.***
DEB: But you didn’t.
ME: And I knew that the next morning when there was a message on my voicemail at work.****
(machine) “Message One was received at 12:20 A.M. June 10th.”
(Deb) “Hi, it’s me. Um, if I tell you that I had a truly wonderful evening, since you’re a math person, can I trust that you’ll blow that up exponentially? To get some sense of what I mean? Bye!”
*It was dusk when we started strolling along the banks of the Susquehanna River, so I grabbed the flashlight out of my car. On the way back it was pretty dark, so I turned on the flashlight. Only I didn’t. My sister had gotten me an emergency flashlight for the car with no batteries to go bad. Just a hand grip to squeeze to generate power. It was Russian-made. Soviet era, I think. It was, um, noisy. Oh, and the light only stayed on as long as I kept pumping it. So! Romantic summer night. Honeysuckle. Frogs. Crickets. My left hand holding Deb’s. And my right hand going ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh-RUHRUHRUH-RRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrr…
**Neither of us count the stupid flashlight as “not perfect.” Go figure.
***I have a history of doing the wrong things for (what seem like at the time) good reasons. Like trying to impress a woman by sending her flowers, and then finding out she’s allergic. So under the circumstances fear was a perfectly reasonable emotion on my part, IMHO.
****I still have the message—the nice thing about being IT Manager is getting to copy audio files off the old PBX system before the new one goes in—but imbedding an audio file into Medium seems to be beyond my patience.
