Picture it: October 1978, a Friday night, a sorta cute twenty something girl, new to the big city. (with apologies to Sophia Petrillo of the Golden Girls)
Facing a long weekend ahead and not knowing anyone in the area, I stopped for a drink at a place that looked interesting. Happy hour was in full swing, most of the tables were filled with couples or groups so I took the only available seat at the bar. I ordered my drink and scoped out the crowd.
Pretty soon I noticed that the older gentleman next to me kept staring at me. He was a little heavy set, balding, with a silly pencil thin moustache, but not altogether bad looking. After a few minutes of catching him staring my way I finally asked him why he kept staring at me.
He looked very embarrassed and said, “oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t staring at you, I was looking at the woman on the other side of you”. Now, I was embarrassed. “Thanks a lot”, I replied. He proceeded to get very flustered and tried to explain how the woman he had been looking at was annoyed at him because of a minor remark he had made to her at happy hour the week before.
We started to chat at that point. His name was Jim. He was an engineer, forty something, divorced, three kids, originally from Oklahoma, etc. He got the synopsis of my situation as well, finance manager, single, no kids, originally from Wisconsin. Somehow in the course of the conversation he managed to quote Winston Churchill, Yogi Berra and St. Thomas Aquinas….. and he made me laugh a lot.
At the end of happy hour, he invited me to go to a place down the road for pizza. Being a “savvy” single, I told him I would follow him in my car. No way was I getting in a car with a guy I had just met an hour before. As he drove out of the parking lot, I noticed that he drove the same kind of Mustang that I had just sold two weeks before because it was a complete lemon. The thought crossed my mind, “watch, I’ll marry the guy and end up with the same stupid car again”. Then I thought, “what am I talking about?” The nuns always told us we should never date someone that we would not marry, but I just met the guy….
We spent the entire evening talking about everything under the sun and ended up dancing in my living room to Billy Joel’s “I Love You Just the Way You Are”. We were still talking when the sun came up. And, 36 years later, we had still never run out of things to talk about.
And, it took us two more years to get rid of his stupid Mustang.