It was the spring of 2003 (Ken had 6 kids by then...maybe more, maybe less) and I was doing improv in a little club in a tiny suburb of LA called, Provo Utah. I was younger and thinner but just as funny, my eyes just as blue and my front tooth just as fake. I don't remember the first time I saw Lindsay, but she does, but you have to understand that she was SO FAR out of my league that my mind didn't even think to hold on to that moment. As a mid-attractive man there are women that you see who are at your level and you mind spins off into the eternities and crates a whole fiction of what life would be if you were to fall in love. My mind did no such thing when I met my wife, certainly my mind spun a filthy web of debauchery, too indecent to blog about here, (that's for my other adult blog, tableandsinglepot) but that was all my mind was ever doing at 24 so why would it hold on to this one perfect moment. Anyway she says I picked her up and spun her around. Who knows?! Why?! This must have been right at the end of my 'Spinning Strangers' phase...it was only, like, two weeks.
So no, I don't remember the first time we met. I do remember our first dinner...well she was actually having dinner with Brett but she sat across from me and I was transfixed. But again, she was out with Brett and Brett only dated (and eventually married) wildly stunning women (He only married one wildly stunning woman)...he was much broodier than me...and taller. But then summer came and with it magic. It was all very fast and tremulous and passionate and fraught and wild and there was a phone call to my district manager to transfer to the Pasadena store and then we were signing a lease and then we were forcing her mother to plan the wedding back in Utah and forcing my mom to pay for the HUGE luncheon (we wanted to save the reception money for our honeymoon, so we utilized the 'Grooms Parents pay for the Luncheon' and invited 200 people and then flew off to Puerto Vallarta.
But then...
After that...
Everything went quiet, or rather, calm...
After the most romantic and passionate summer of any summer ever lived by anyone. We settled, or rather, landed on the first year of our marriage. And the soft gold dust of LA landed, or rather, settled on our skin. And we traded our midnight independent movies for 5 o'clock homemade dinners on our balcony, just the two of us, face to face and the whole year, still, stays gold and edge-blurred and perfect. We had found each other against all odds, my mid-attractiveness and lower middle intelligence and her staggering beauty and insatiable mind not withstanding, we found each other. It was not in either of our plans but then, one day, it was only ever going to be just like this:
or this...
and this...
or this...
now this...
And I will love her forever.
