Conversation with My Wife (197)
Did we meet cute? Depends on who is asking, apparently
Louise Foerster posted a nice piece of short fiction about meeting cute. Well, actually, it’s more about not meeting cute:
And then (while reading this on our backyard porch where I can watch the bird feeders) I saw a blue jay take a big piece of suet in its beak and fly to the nearby cherry tree, where another jay was sitting. Jay1 offered the suet chunk to Jay2, who accepted it. Awww, thought I, I haven’t seen this sort of courtship between blue jays!¹ How sweet!
So then Jay1 flies back to the suet, gets another chunk, returns to the cherry tree… where Jay2 is checking out something in the other direction, oblivious. Jay1 waits several seconds, then eats the piece of suet. Jay2, meanwhile, has located the suet feeder and flies over to get sustenance directly. Basically just your standard TV show plot about high school.
Deb and I met under better circumstances. I was starting with a new company as their head of IT. Deb was head of admin support, plus the president’s assistant, and the de facto HR person, so she emailed me my offer/acceptance letter with the usual boilerplate, sign here, yada yada. I had a couple questions, which I emailed back with my usual sense of humor; she replied in the same vein. I suppose it was sort of flirtatious, but I didn’t mean it that way. And it wasn’t “meet cute” in any way.
Was it?
ME: So did we meet cute? Either time?
DEB: (looking at me for some clues as to what I’m talking about; not finding any) I have no idea. Who is “Cute”?
ME: No no, meet in a cute way. Like in a rom-com.
DEB: (thinks) Sure. You showed up at my desk with no warning,² and I suddenly had to deal with you first thing even though you were not on my #1 priority list because — (gestures at me)
ME: There I was.
DEB: There you were. So sure, I can see where that would be rom-com cute.
ME: But our email meeting wasn’t cute.
DEB: I wrote to you that your job would involve travel to Germany.³ You wrote back that that was fine, but you would prefer that you didn’t have to take your parents because they tended to cause heart palpitations and pain in your upper right arm.⁴ I wrote back that family was always welcome to accompany employees on a pay-their-own-way basis, but it had to not interfere with job duties, and anything that might cause you to be incapacitated would interfere, so there was a loophole. Is that cute? I will let you be the judge.
Okay, throwing that one open to the reading public. Please respond below.
¹We have a cardinal couple who do something similar, but it doesn’t count as courtship (IMHO) because they’ve been together forever. Mr C (as we call him) will find a nice seed, fly or hop over to Mrs C, offer it to her, and she sweetly accepts. Apparently this is standard cardinal behavior, I think James Finn has remarked on it in his avian observations.
²During my second hiring interview, I got shown where my desk would be if I got hired. [Pro tip: if the people interviewing you are showing you around like you’re going to work there, they probably want you to work there.] I also knew where Deb’s desk was, because it was right next to the conference room where I had interviewed. So the morning of my first day at work, I got there early because I didn’t know how bad morning rush hour traffic would be, which turned out well because the front door was open but the receptionist wasn’t there yet. I just walked in and made myself at home in my new cube. Then around eight o’clock (when I was supposed to show up) I just walked over to Deb’s desk and said hi. Deb, who for some reason had taken it for granted that I would see the receptionist so that I could be announced, looked at me like I had suddenly beamed in from the Enterprise.
³The parent company was in Germany. New employees got a visit to headquarters to be indoctrinated in how The Empire did business.
⁴Totally true, by the way.
Copyright ©2021 by Jack Herlocker. All rights reserved, and if I have to come after you, we will NOT “meet cute.”
