(Blog number six) A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON MY WAY TO A LIFE

I met my wife in Denver.  I was in the Air Force.  My buddy and I were coming out of a bar and my to-be wife and her friend, Jill, were coming back from confession.  We picked them up.  Actually, my buddy picked up Jill and the rest of us just went along.  "The rest" being my wife-to-be and me.  Let's call my wife-to-be, "Teresa" and save a little time.  That WAS her real name, but everyone knew her as Terry. 

So the four of us go down the street, chatting like pickups do.  I seemed to be with Teresa's friend "Jill," my friend, "Tommy" seemed to be with Terry.  Shortly into the pickup courtship, Teresa and Jill went on ahead and had a little conference.  When they came back, I was with Terry and Tommy was with Jill.  For years after, Terry would tell me that Jill didn't want to be with me, she wanted to trade, so we did.  In those days females always did the picking of who went with who.  About twenty-five years into our marriage when we were starting to be civil to each other, Terry told me that SHE was the one who wanted to trade because Tommy was kinda of a dork.  He was fun, but strange -- naive, excitable, dorky.  I spent twenty-five years thinking I was a reject.  Is that fair?

A coupla months into our courtship, after only one bad fight -- which should have been an omen of things to come, I was getting ready to ship out.  Terry said to me, "How am I going to live without you?  So, not knowing that she said that to all her boyfriends, I took it seriously.  Poor girl.  Trying to help her out, I asked her to marry me.

She said, "No."

Whew.

Coupla nights later, same thing happened.  She can't live without me, I got a soft heart, I again asked her to marry me.

She said, "No."

Few nights later we run through the same scenario, only this time she says, "Yes."

Well, sacrifices are there to be made.  What a great humanitarian I am.  We set a date.

At the wedding -- Justice of the Peace, me, Teresa, Tommy and Jill.  Tommy and Jill best man and maid of honor.  The wedding never made the papers.

That afternoon -- my wedding day remember, I went to the base to eat at the mess hall, leaving Terry in the car.  After that, we went into town where Terry ate in a restaurant while Tommy and I sat at the bar and drank.  It never occurred to me that anything was out of the ordinary.  I treated my new bride like that and thought nary a thing about it.

Six or seven months before this day, I was sitting with a friend at a table with two girls and he was being very charming and pleasant while I just sat there.  After the girls left, my friend asked me why I didn't play up the girls -- ask them questions about their lives.  He said, "Aren't you interested in people?" 

"What for?"  I wondered.  "What good are they?"  I was honestly puzzled by the question. 

A few years into our marriage, we moved outside Sacramento, into the country.  This was in the sixties.  Across the road from us moved in some exotic hippies.  At that time the Vietnam war was going strong and one of their friends who was stationed there had sent back some strong marijuana.  I tried some.  All that night I would often say to myself, "Here I am again!"  I had the distinct impression that I was going back in time and every once in a while I would "come back" to the present.  Pot makes you concentrate on the here and now.  This was what was making me "return." 

It was many years later, after analysis and meditation, that I realized what was happening was that I was always in my head -- never "here."  I spent the first forty years of my life almost completely in my head -- sleepwalking through life.  Today I often wish that I knew what was going on at different occurrences in my life.  But those days have been erased.

Teresa and I fought a lot.  One day while driving home from work, in my head I was going, "I'll say this and then she'll say that and then I'll reply this and she'll come back with..."  By the time I got home, I was so angry with her...  This must have been happening a lot, but that was the first time I saw that I had actually had an argument with me being the only person involved.  This was the guy that didn't think anything was wrong with him -- that only wanted analysis in order to "learn."

I used to often cross the street if I saw someone that I knew coming toward me.  I didn't want that person to reject me, so I wouldn't know whether or not to greet them.  So to avoid the problem, I would avoid the guy -- pretend I didn't see them.

One night at a carnival, I was by myself when I felt this warm hand in mine.  It was a girl who was with her friend.  I bought myself a ticket to watch a wrestling match -- she must have bought one too, although I don't remember this part.  I do remember holding her hand all through the match and back outside and at some point the hand was gone.  I never knew what that girl -- nor her friend, looked like.  To this day I don't know.

Twice I was sitting in a booth at a drugstore when a girl asked if she could sit with me.  I said, "Yes" without looking up.  I never looked at people's eyes -- or even at their feet, as I remember.  Both times, I never knew who the girl was.  Once the girl that asked was with her mother, the other time she was alone.

Years later, married, I was standing in line at the bank and I looked down at a small boy and got a look I had never seen before.  I turned away before it registered - I wasn't even able to hold a contact with a four year old if he was a stranger.  For years after that I would think of that incident and wonder what it was that I had seen.  Eventually I found out that it was a friendly look.  I looked at someone who looked at me in a friendly manner and I didn't know what it was because I had never seen it before!  Man, was I a mess.  And I didn't even know it -- had not an inkling.

I used to go to parties with Terry when she was in college and I would sit in a corner pretending to be engrossed in a book or a magazine that I picked up.  I thought that that way nobody would know that I was shy.  Hah!  Silly boy.  I thought that everyone knew how to "party" except me.  Without ever consciously realizing it, I always hoped I would meet someone who would tell me how to live.  It seemed like everyone else knew something that was going on except me.

Stopping now.