Love Story

Once upon a time in 1988 or so, I went to work at a yogurt shop in Portland. It was the second counter-service restaurant that I had worked. I was hired as the assistant manager, and primarily worked the evening shift. For anyone who has not worked in food service, the late shift people form sort of a crew–gangsta style.

They get up late morning or early afternoon, usually a little hung over. They have their coffee as the heat of the afternoon hits, and just as everyone else is thinking about getting off work and going out for a bite, they walk out the door and head in to start work. Work is crazy. Restaurants are always staffed to work everyone hard, or else they go out of business. After work, it’s generally past midnight before everything is washed down and ready for the next day, and everyone is still coming down from the adrenaline of the evening. So the crew heads out, often to someone’s house, for drinks and whatever.

Julie and I met as part of the evening crew at the yogurt shop. She was a grown-up. She had a college degree. She wasn’t living with her mom; she had her own apartment. During the days she worked at the bankruptcy court, and this was her second job. She was married to a professional baseball player, who in addition to being a big, handsome athlete, was similarly grown up. He, however was away playing baseball, and so she joined the rest of us for post-work events, often hosting since she lived only a few blocks from work. I thought she was beautiful and funny and clever, but it was clear to me on many levels that she was out of my league, and completely off limits.

Over time, the crew that we started with turned over. The new people just weren’t the same. They wanted to go dancing or just go home, not go hang out and drink in someone’s apartment and watch movies. Evenings out had become less frequent. One night, three of us from the original crew made plans to go over to Julie’s and watch a movie after work. At the last minute, the third guy bailed, and it was just the two of us. He was supposed to bring the beer, so we went over to Safeway, and I waited outside while she went in and bought some beer, because I was only 17 or 18. Then, all those things happened that happen when two people that are secretly attracted to one another get drunk in an apartment late at night.

For the next few days, I didn’t go home. We hid what was going on from everyone at work, and didn’t talk much about the impending return of her husband at the end of summer. We agreed that her fling with the kid at the yogurt shop would have to end when her husband came back, but until then we were constant companions. After a week or two, he did come home. One day she brought him into the yogurt shop, and of course we both acted like nothing had happened.

He hadn’t been home but a few days, when I got a call late at night. It was Julie. She told me she was leaving her husband. I was mortified. In the space of a heartbeat I realized I was in the middle of something much larger than I was prepared for. I was a kid, a high-school dropout , 17 or barely 18, and divorce was a grownup thing, a bad grownup thing, and it was my fault. What was more frightening was that while I thought she was great, I knew that I couldn’t really commit myself to a relationship of the kind of substance that an adult would expect.

Before I could even attempt to explain all my anxiety, she set me straight and made it all go away. She told me that she was leaving her husband because their relationship wasn’t right. Her fling with me was a symptom, not the disease. She thought it would be great if we could keep seeing each other. If things went went well, that would be great, but if not, she would go her own way. I told her I was sorry that her marriage was not going to work, but that I was glad we could keep seeing each other.

Within a day or two, she found a new place. It was at the worst apartment complex in SW Portland. I went over to visit her after work when she moved in, and I never went home. I never really told my mom I was moving out, I just didn’t go home anymore. I slowly moved more clothes in, and then my guitar, and eventually my mom gave us some kitchen supplies, and then it was just acknowledged that we were living together.

The apartment was really awful though. A dead body in a nearby unit got to stinking before the coroner was finally called. Someone was clearly peeing in one of the stairwells. A car was parked in our parking spot for several days. I got pissed and slashed the tires. The cops eventually came and towed it; it was stolen. When the ceiling started sagging over our clothes from a roof leak though, it was too much and we decided to move.

We got another apartment a few blocks away where we lived together for more than a year. We made a home and were pretty happy in hindsight. I, however, felt increasingly directionless. I had realized that being a high-school dropout was not a recipe for career success, but I didn’t see how to get out from under my mistakes. Like so many other kids, I went to a military recruiter. I my case, the plan that formed was to join the Navy, save a bunch of money, and then use the GI Bill to go to the Guitar Institute in Los Angeles, en en route to a career as a professional musician.

Julie was not excited about the Navy, but she was supportive and understood that being a shift manager in coffee shops wasn’t really fulfilling for me. Conversely, I was sure I needed to make a change, but I was really unhappy about what my plan meant for Julie and me. I had developed a keen intuition for when my romantic relationships were doomed, and after a year I still couldn’t see why this one would have to end. We didn’t really have a lot of common interests, but we enjoyed being around one another, and that was good enough for both of us.

We considered the possibility that she could move to follow me, but for at least the first year, the Navy would require me to live on the base in the barracks, so we could not see each other reliably or share living expenses. I had learned that if we were married, the Navy would let us live together in an off-base apartment during my training, which would mean we would only be apart during boot camp. Not only that, but they would pay for her to move, and give us extra money for living expenses.

In what was the signature event in what became a 30 year marriage, we talked things over. We both acknowledged that our relationship was unlikely to survive the strain of living apart, across the country from one another, for a year. However we both also knew that neither of us was really in a position to make a believable commitment to a permanent relationship, given my youth and her recent divorce. And so I proposed, not so much marriage, but a solution: “If we get married, we can keep living together and see if this works out. If it doesn’t, we can always get divorced.”

If not a direct quote, that was pretty close. You’ll notice there was no “Will you marry me?” though I might have said, “What do you think?” or maybe not. In any case, it was not any more romantic than it sounds. There was no engagement ring. We agreed that getting married was the best thing to do, and we were happy. Not the busting-at-the-seams, there’s-kittens-shitting-rainbow-unicorns, kind of happy that is commonly associated with this sort of thing, but the calm, contented sort of happy with knowing that we could stay together.

She had a little bit of money, so she bought us rings at Fred Meyer. We planned the wedding, which entailed meeting at the Justice of the Peace after she got off work with one or two of my friends and my mom. Julie had not met my father, who was living across the country, and I was a little surprised at how important it was to him and my grandmother that they meet her. They couldn’t get to Portland before our appointment with the judge (I hesitate to say “our ceremony”), so afterward we went to Red Robin, and there she met my father and my grandmother for the first time.

I had only met Julie’s parents a couple of times, and I think they (with good reason) advised her against going forward with the marriage, but she stuck to her guns, and they planned a reception for us at their house, then put us up in a nice hotel afterward. We took a long weekend to go to Vancouver for a honeymoon (also at our parents expense), and then it was off to boot camp a week or so later.

Over the more than thirty years we were married, I would sometimes feel guilty about our Fred Meyer rings and our Justice of the Peace ceremony. A few times I suggested going somewhere to renew our vows but got no enthusiasm. Once we had some money, I suggested we buy new rings, but she was never interested. She liked the one she had. When mine eventually broke, she encouraged me to get a new fancy one if I didn’t like the ones from Fred Meyer, but she didn’t want a new one. So I got mine repaired, and bought her some jewelry instead.

We would both sometimes forget our anniversary, but we put together a big party for one of them. I felt like I was obliged to say a few words to capture how special she was to me and how special I thought our relationship was. Words failed me that night, and I think they always will. Telling this story is the closest I may ever come.

In reading back through this and editing it, I realized something for the first time. In many ways, “the proposal” was not the signature event of our relationship: the moment that established the never-quite-articulated principles by which we would find our way together. It seems obvious now that was just a mirror-image of the night she called, and told me she was leaving her husband, but not to worry, everything would be okay whatever happened.