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How I Met My Husband

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I originally typed in, “Ho I Met My Husband” and quite honestly I sometimes (I just spelled sumtimes, so gather what you will from this ongoing statement) think my typos are my brain’s way of communicating the truth of the matter.

I was working at a bank, that shall remain nameless, and I had just been promoted to New Accounts. This pretty much entailed me running over to the account floor from my teller station when the call came that they were too busy. My new promotion came with a tidy no-raise.

One fateful day in September of 1998, I received a call from, hmmm, let’s call her Carla (which ironically might be her actual name as I have long forgotten it but that sounds familiar), that she was swamped and needed someone to help her in New Accounts. I, being that someone.

Let’s get to what I was wearing, since that is the most important not-important part. I always tried to wear a pencil skirt to my work. The skirt was to be as tight and short as I could get away with. Of course. I was twenty one and wanted to exude some sort of professionalism. It just was not the sort of profession I probably thought I was showcasing. That day I was wearing my favorite lime green suit. It was actually citron and it had a permanent pen line right across the butt that I had never been able to get out. However, I refused to stop wearing it. I just assumed no one would notice.

I sat down at my least favorite desk. It was right in the middle of the floor and could be seen from all angles. To this day, I prefer to sit in corners, my back to a wall, so I can face out and see what is coming at me. My exposed back, having nothing whatsoever to do with a black line across it, made me feel frazzled and exposed. Plus, I felt a heavy burden in New Accounts. I, myself, did not bank with this particular bank. I was burdened with some of their practices. I felt by opening an account there for someone else, I was partaking in their sins. It made me feel bad.

I gathered my necessary items and nervously stood up. There was a line of people waiting. I went to the board where the first name was written and I called that person’s name. The first part of the name was a name that I had loved in high school. I once had a crush on a boy strictly because he had this name. It would be a name that I am glad I pronounced correctly, because it is one that I now say every day.

The young guy grinned at me when I called his name and followed me to the desk.

I remember asking him if I had pronounced his name right and him telling me that I had. It would be the first thing I would ever say to my husband.

He sat down across from me and we began the procedure of opening his account. I would later learn that two days before he came to that bank he had moved to that town. The day before he had sat in that chair, he had been in a car accident in front of the bank, the bank where I worked, and while he had waited for the police to come to the scene of the accident, he would decide that he would come back the next day and open an account at that bank. And I would later learn that when he came home from the bank the day I had opened his account, he would exclaim to his visiting relatives that THE HOTTEST GIRL (yes, I am using all caps here. No apologies) had just opened his account.

But sitting across from him in that chair I knew none of his past or his future.

I studied him as I asked him the routine questions.

He was wearing a faded green thermal henley shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His hair was brown and his eyes matched the green of his shirt. It would not surprise me when later in the year, I would stand in his green bedroom and learn that the color that he wore and decorated with was his favorite and always would be. He had perfectly full lips which would one day kiss me in such a manner that I would crave them forever. He had his shirt tucked in and his pants were rolled. I remember them as being terribly unfashionably pegged, but my husband reiterates time and again that they were just rolled. And so we will give him the memory credit here. His shoes were Vans. There was something rugged about the way he was dressed. An air about him that spoke of the outdoors. He was different from the typical California guys that I had grown up with. I now know that this is because he was from Oregon. An Oregon boy who would never quite get used to California and would always long for the land he once knew. But at this moment, the moment we are meeting him, he is simply dressed like a boy from Oregon. We do not yet know his heart. We do not yet know the struggles of his soul.

I remember holding my breath as I waited for the screen to tell me if we could proceed with the opening of the account. So many young people I had previously seen come in had been denied this step. It was always embarrassing for both me and that person.

He was approved.

I then asked him his occupation. His age. His marital status. His address. His previous address. His phone number. His debt. His income. All routine questions from the bank. Not routine questions that you get to ask a suitor.

Seriously girls, if only all women had access to the kind of information I had access to before I started dating my husband…

He answered all of the questions. I remember being impressed with his career because he was so young. I had never met anyone his age that was so confident, secure, and sure of themselves before. It was dissettling. So, of course, I assumed he was lying. It is sad that that seemed more logical to me than the idea that a young man could have his life so well organized and together. He wanted direct deposit and I signed him up for an account that would be free with direct deposit. But being new at New Accounts, I also remember blasely thinking, “We’ll see if this actually works.” It wouldn’t. A month later I would see him at a pool hall where he would approach me and tell me that he had been wrongly charged and get my phone number.

But at that moment, what I told him was, “let me know if you get charged and I will take care of it.” Of course, I didn’t mean it. He smirked at me and I remember feeling irritated and displaced that a guy with his pants pegged rolled would be so cocky. Especially one who was so obviously lying. It would only be later that I would learn, this boy never lies… Except about eating candy bars.

Then he did the unthinkable.

My heart sank when the cute, but cocky, twenty five year old guy across from me did not want the free checks. The free checks that were free and practical and a good financial choice. For some reason, I felt very strongly about those free checks.

What checks did he want?

He wanted… Looney Toons.

Yep.

Looney Toons… Playing sports.

I do not remember the rest of the conversation. I remember ordering his checks and being unsure if the order went through. But I was not too concerned. At that point, the guy had lost some of his appeal with his check making decision.

He stood up to leave and he grinned at me. I remember my heart racing in my chest and being annoyed with myself because I could not understand why I was feeling this way towards a dishonest boy with pegged rolled jeans and looney toon checks.

I watched him walk out of the bank. I watched him walk through the parking lot. I watched him stand next to a beat up old van and I assumed wrongly that he had gotten into it. I assumed wrongly about a lot of things that day. I turned to call another customer. I thought about the boy with the green eyes for the remainder of the day.

Less than six months later that boy and I would share the same last name.

But that is a story for another day.

I will tell you, that boy turned into a man who only orders the free checks.

His marital status has changed.

He now does drive a beat up old van.

But his pants are no longer pegged.

by

The Girl With Three Thumbs

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It is funny the memories one’s mind chooses to hold onto. A smidgen of information about childhood formed in a handful of brief flashes. I cannot recall to mind the first day I started school. Nor the last. I cannot remember the shape of the dining room table we ate at, night after night in those early years. But I can recall with a vividness beyond what should be, the formation we sat in in our kindergarten class.

Our names written on masking tape marking the spot on the ground where we were to sit. The first few days, the letters meaning nothing and then over time, they became as part of the every day as the nose on my face.

I was Jenni. This was different than the other Jennis in class. We also had a Jeni and a Jenny. My mother was always adamant that my name would end in an “i.” And so it was that it became and so it was that it is to this day.

We would sit quietly on the mat. Our legs criss-crossed, and called a politically incorrect term. One of the first things taught to all of us children was to sit upon the ground with our legs folded. A formation that continues in our current schools with a slightly different name.

I have no idea who sat to the left of me. It was not one of the Jennis. I do not know if it was a boy or a girl. I do not remember our knees touching or our shoes colliding. My focus was entirely upon the girl to my right. I do remember her name, but we will not use it here. I shall call her Charlotte. For reasons only I will know.

I am sure while we were all sitting on the ground with our knees in salute, our teacher must have been teaching us something. But the entire time I sat there, my focus was upon one thing. And it had nothing at all to do with school. My mother had always told me that it was impolite to point. I am sure she also taught me that it is impolite to stare. However, a five year old stumbling upon something from a fairy tale seated right beside her, could not help oneself.

I was mesmerized.

Charlotte had two thumbs. Oh, yes, I know. We all have two thumbs. However, Charlotte had two thumbs plus one. Upon her right hand, she had two thumbs. One was much thinner and smaller than the other. A shriveled twin to its functioning sister. I loved it. I was insanely jealous of her gift. For to me, it was a gift. An abnormality to be sure, but so different. So wonderful. I had no idea that nature could go awry. I did not know that human beings could be created differently other than in books.

Because Charlotte’s thumbs were upon her right hand, and I sat upon her left, it was at an awkward direction that I would have to turn my head to stare at her appendage. Thankfully, in addition to crossing our legs, our teacher frequently also had us cross our hands. And so I could gaze down at Charlotte’s wonder with ease whenever our teacher felt we were in need of structure.

Sometimes this would be difficult. At the time, I was Charlotte’s only friend. She was a quiet girl who whispered answers and even then it would take much prodding for her to do that. She had long coarse black hair that curled at the ends. Even though it was long enough that she could sit upon it, she never did so. She took to putting her head down at such an angle that her hair would almost completely cover her face. Hiding in its stringy shadows, she could escape from inquisitive children and ignore curious eyes.

This actually proved to be beneficial to me, because I could stare at her hands without her noticing. Although looking back, she obviously knew what I was doing. I probably provoked her into her solitary cave of hair with my rude envy, but I did not think about it at the time.

Every day I would sit next to Charlotte. Charlotte with her wonderful thumbs. I never asked her about them. To me, they were simply there. She had more than the rest of us. She had extra. And more is always better. And extra did not need to be explained.

One day I went to school and Charlotte was not there. You would think this would mean I finally paid attention to my lessons, but alas, that was not so. With Charlotte gone, her name sat all alone on the floor. The tape peeling at the corners, collecting bits of black fuzz and countless specks of dirt. I would stare at the letters of her name. She had more than I did. A different variety. The girl seemed to be blessed with an abundance that the rest of us were lacking.

Charlotte was gone for a week. I was relieved when she finally returned. I had begun to pay attention to my lessons and there was no fun in that. She sat down on the floor beside me and that is when I noticed she was different. On her right hand, she had a white bandage. It covered where her small, innocent extra thumb had laid. I stared at the gauzy covering with alarm. And for the first time all year, I felt eyes upon my own. I looked up and Charlotte was staring back at me. Her stance was defiant. Her mouth was set. And I knew in that moment that she did not like my attention upon her hand. That she never had. I felt the heat of embarrassed shame creep up my neck and I averted my eyes from Charlotte’s penetrating accusation to our teacher’s back.

This did not stop me from stealing glances each day at the hand. I was not sure what was under the bandage, but I had a heavy sick feeling in my stomach that I knew. I was terrified of the gauze being removed. I did not want to see what mysteries it held.

But as the saying goes, time does heal all wounds. And one day, Charlotte came to school without a white bandage.

I nervously looked down at her hand. Instead of the dainty, precious appendage that had once lay next to its stronger, more useful digit, there lay instead an uneven furious red jagged scar.

It was appalling.

The hows and whys were too numerous for my young soul to count.

Why would someone remove a perfectly wonderful abnormality?

What happened to it?

Where did it go?

I could not bear to look at the empty space where a miracle had once existed. After that day, Charlotte began to wear her hair clipped behind her ears. She still whispered when she spoke but did so more frequently. She became best friends with another little girl in class. A louder girl. They became inseparable and the last time I saw either one of them had been at our high school graduation. I was not invited into their fold. And if the truth were to be told, I did not want to be.

For Charlotte’s differentness had never scared me. I found it fascinating. I found her an enigma crawling with unanswered questions of the universe. But from the moment she removed her special, she alarmed me. It made me unexplainably angry. She became just like the rest of us. Which as an adult I imagine was greatly to her relief and exactly the reason she had her surgery. But to me, the odd child searching for the eclectic among the mundane. Hoping that the tedious normalcy I had begun to view in the everyday world was a deceptive barrier from the truth. I wanted the fantasy of magic. The wonder. The infinite answers. To be more. Charlotte had had more and she chose to remove it. What did that mean? Why would one choose to be normal when you could choose to be more? Charlotte once had two thumbs plus one. Eleven appendages upon her hands. Twenty one digits to count with. One more finger than all of the rest of us.

At the age of five, I grieved for her loss. And for my own. I had never had the opportunity to hold her hand in my own. To stroke the small little marvelous irregularity. To ask all of my questions and dance in the happiness of the unknown. I hastened to try to make sense of what she had done. And I couldn’t.

Charlotte had once been The Girl With Three Thumbs.

And now she was minus one. Just like the rest of us. Just like me. Just.

by

I Hate Pigeons

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The blasted rats with wings.

“Coo. Coo. Coo.

“I hate you.”

It all started back when my daughter was three months old.

Rewind.

It all started when I was pregnant with my daughter and we moved into a rental home.

There was a rustling in the eves. I looked up. And a thousand pigeons stared down at me.

“Oh. Aren’t they cute?” I ignorantly thought.

I assumed anything would have been better than the apartment where we had been living. A girl I went to high school with lived in the same apartment complex. She had woken up the week before when a bullet went through the pillow next to her head. The neighbors upstairs had gotten into a little spat. No biggie.

It happens.

We moved the next week.

Into a different kind of nightmare.

A nightmare occupied and governed by a new beast.

A beast innocently called, “pigeon.”

There is nothing innocent about a pigeon.

Don’t let those children’s books, “Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus!” fool you. There should be a book entitled, “Don’t let the pigeons near us!” or something similar. Maybe a little darker. Maybe involving a certain pigeon and a bus with the kind of happy ending I could get behind. Anyway, I digress…

They were everywhere.

We could not clean up the droppings fast enough.

I gave birth to my daughter and rarely left the house for three months. This led me to conveniently ignore the pigeons. I thought they were an annoying nuissance. Nothing more. Certainly not a death trap.

Okay. Let’s fast forward. My daughter is three months old. It was raining. I went to lay her down in her crib for her nap and I felt a drop of water hit my hand. I looked up and the entire ceiling above her crib was swollen with water. It drooped low and menacingly above our heads.

I quickly ran and placed my daughter safely in her bassinet in our bedroom. Then I moved the crib towards the doorway, away from the bowing ceiling.

I then called my landlord.

“Hello. Yes, this is your tenants. The ceiling in our daughter’s room is completely filled with wa-.”

CRASH!

I ran into the room. The ceiling had caved in. The area where my daughter’s crib had been mere minutes before was now littered with broken plaster and jagged beams.

To say it was scary was an understatement.

It turns out that the delightful pigeons fiends that had roosted there had feces that could melt a roof. And they did. And it was.

And then the roof was fixed.

Here is the kicker: Apparently this was the third time this had happened! And they let me put my baby’s room there. And they never exterminated the house! And we moved two months later.

They do exist!

Now that I am aware of the detriments that these creatures can create, I am always watchful of a single pigeon. I will not let these tenants move in. Not for one day. Not for an hour.

The other day, I heard it. It was the sound from my nightmares.

“Coo!”

“Mom, is that an owl?”

“No, son. That’s a demon.”

I went outside. There it was, resting on my chimney. Taunting me.

Seriously, look at it looking at me.

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Why? Why do I spend all of my efforts on my thighs? If the pigeon was closer, I could have used my thigh’s awesome power and clapped it to smitherines. But no such luck. It was not getting near my trap.

Then I thought of it.

I scrambled to the pool area. I grabbed one of my kid’s high power water guns. I filled it with pool water.

And I took aim.

I fired.

It hit the side of the roof.

The pigeon was not phased.

I refilled my gun.

Missed again!

At this point, I was covered in water. I was wearing rain boots (photo shoot for a story). It was eighty degrees and sunny outside. I was screaming at the bird. I was giving the bird the bird. And I am sure my neighbors were cooing in their pants.

Refill. Shoot. Miss. Scream.

Repeat.

Finally the pigeon took pity on me. Or I had turned into a bigger monster than it.

It left.

I hope it did not leave to get back-up.

Oh well. I have a whole pool full of water and many more refills in me.

This war ain’t over.

“Coo! Coo! Coo!

I’ll get you.”

Has a war ever been won with water guns? I am afraid I am about to find out.

*I recognize the pictures are of a Dove and not a Pigeon. In my flurry of uncharacteristically fast movement I forgot to get a picture of THE Pigeon. If you squint, you can just pretend like I do. Of course, I don’t squint. I just drink wine. Cheers.

by

The First Theft

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We have discussed my husband’s scheming plots here before. His sneaky thefts did not start with the iPod. The looting started long before that. His trickery is a repeating spiral of deception (this is where I feel the need to add for those that do not get my humor, that I am kidding. My husband is the sweetest man alive. The following story is told with tongue in cheek)…

When my husband and I first got married, we had a little argument. It has been almost sixteen years. I have never let it go. I think this is not healthy.

You see, I was pregnant and all I wanted besides hamburgers, cake, and ice cream were Twix candy bars. I would buy them by the handful at the grocery store.

One day something tragic happened.

I opened the cupboard before I went to work and there lying on the shelf was the only survivor of my traumatic food binge from the night before. The gold wrapper of the Twix bar sparkled like tears in the fluorescent kitchen light. I thought about sparing the poor soul. But then I remembered he was made of chocolate. I patted his crinkly skin and vowed to end his torment the moment I got home from work. I gently shut the cupboard doors and begrudgingly left for work.

All day I daydreamed of my victim.

The gooey caramel that would spill forth when I bit into its chocolate flesh. The scream of the wrapper as I ripped it apart. The crunch of its cookie foundation as I devoured its essence.

I could not wait.

The moment I got home I ran to the cupboard. I threw open the doors expecting to see my gleaming golden prize.

Instead I saw…

Nothing.

There was nothing there.

I knew only one thing could have happened.

Someone else must have gotten to my source of happiness first.

I spun around and faced my husband who was innocently humming to himself as he fried some onions in a pan for dinner. He did not know he had the worst kind of monster behind him.

The hungry angry wife.

“Did you eat my Twix Bar?” I practically shouted. I really did not need to hear his answer. It was quite obvious that he had. There were two people who had a key to our apartment. The two people in the kitchen. And those two people had an unhealthy obsession with Twix Bars.

My husband spun around surprised. “N-n-n-o.”

“Well then, where is it? I left it right here before I left this morning.”

The candy thief My husband had composed himself while I spoke. Now he was indignant. “Well, I didn’t eat it. Maybe you ate it and forgot.”

Maybe I ate it and forgot?

The devoured Twix Bar probably boiled like lava in his stomach from the fire shooting from my eyes.

Six words had never made me madder.

As if I would not remember the experience of eating my chocolatey treat. As if I was some sort of candy eating creature who searched the cupboards and thoughtlessly devoured anything sweet in sight (let’s forget about the Twix’s brothers that had disappeared, themselves, throughout the week. This was simply about Twix himself and I knew I had not eaten him).

“I didn’t eat the Twix bar! You ate it! I know you ate it!”

“I didn’t eat it! I didn’t even know we had a Twix bar!”

“I know you did it. Just admit it.” (This was the time in our lives when our only VHS tape was a Chris Rock video. I am pretty sure he did not mean a candy bar when he said those lines).

“I didn’t do it!”

This went on and on.

For sixteen years. We go back and forth about the candy bar a few times a year. Isn’t that sweet?

But I know my husband ate my Twix Bar. I sometimes wish I could go back in time and go over the crime scene one more time. Smell his breath. His fingers. Check the trash can for the the wrapper. But I can’t. So now I just need him to admit the truth.

He has maintained his innocence for more than a decade. I don’t believe the facade for a second.

We have gone through years of Twix slogans taunting us on the television.

A few years ago Twix ran with the phrase, “Two for me. None for you.” I would glare at my husband and ask him in response to the commercial, “Did you write that?”

There is now the more recent campaign, “Need a moment. Chew it over with Twix.” I can perfectly picture him reliving the moment when I first asked him if he had eaten my golden candy bar. If only he had had a moment to think of a better answer…

I think my husband has a secret side job.

How else to explain the ads?

My children have been born and raised with the Twix homicide story. I have not asked them to take up the case when they get older. It is not a mystery. It is not an unsolved crime. We do not need a detective.

I know my husband did it.

Now I just need him to admit it.

Any ideas on how to catch a criminal? Do you ever have ridiculous fights with your partner? Did the Twix Bar get up and walk away from its captors? Most importantly, do you think he ate it?

In the words of the candy bar in question, “Try both and pick a side. Chew it over with Twix.”