Lemme tell ya ‘bout my first wife.
No, no, it’s OK; I won’t be using any language unsuitable for a family
newspaper. I won’t need to; my first wife was just fine. And even if she wasn’t
(but she was), our parting was over 35 years ago. I could never hold a grudge
that long.
Any bad feelings trailing our
marriage like tin cans behind a bridal car were dealt with back in the ‘80s.
We’ve been on friendly terms for decades.
Also, the divorce was my fault. I was
barely out of my teens when we got hitched. Even now I’m not exactly a paragon
of maturity; in those days I possessed the emotional temperament of a teething
toddler fighting nap time. The relationship never stood a chance.
But for five years, we were happy together.
Linda gets the credit for this. She was patient, forgiving and — sexist though
it may be to say this — a real stunner. Her Scandinavian heritage produced in
her a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Barbie doll who turned heads wherever we went.
Also, she was intelligent, educated and sociable.
In other words, she was out of my
league, though at the time I didn’t recognize this fact. Why she married me,
I’ll never know. (I’m sure she’s asked herself exactly that question on more
than one occasion.)
But like I said, for five years we
were good together. We did all the stuff young couples do: movies, picnics,
long days reading on the beach. Basically, all the filler scenes from any
romantic comedy of the past 50 years.
We even went to the gym together. I
know, I know, looking at me now it’s hard to believe I’ve ever seen the inside of
a health club, but I swear it’s true.
In those day (and maybe now, who
knows? Not me, that’s for sure) most health clubs were segregated by gender;
the girls worked out on one side, the guys on the other. All that Spandex, the club
management reckoned, was just a tad too distracting.
So our regular routine was to work
out separately, and then meet up afterward at the hot tub or pool, which were
coed and in another part of the club.
On the day I’m thinking of, I logged
my 60 minutes of free weights, the theme song to “Rocky” playing in my head the
entire time. Then I showered and hit the hot tub, anxious to let the heavily
chlorinated, semi-scalding water massage away the resulting aches and pains
(though I don’t remember Sylvester Stallone needing a soak in a hot tub, even
after going 15 rounds with that Russian guy).
Through the gauze of fog surrounding the
club’s spa like steam over a pot of chicken soup, I saw that Linda was already
in there. That made me happy. Seeing her back then always made me happy.
What made me unhappy was the muscle-y guy sitting right next to her, chatting
her up like they were old friends. I sucked in my gut, pushed out my chest and
did my best to appear muscle-y myself; I was only partly successful.
Stepping down into the tub, I took a
seat on Linda’s free side.
“Hey cutie,” I said.
“Um, hey,” she said. Muscle guy did
not look glad to see me. Good.
“Water’s hot today,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. Then she turned and
started talking to this other guy again, completely ignoring me!
Well, I wasn’t about to take this
sort of treatment! Was I a man or a mouse! Stand up for yourself, I told
myself. Establish your dominance!
So I did. I put my hand on Linda’s
knee. That got her attention. She turned back toward me.
“Uh, your hand’s on my knee,” she
said.
I smiled roguishly. “I know.”
Muscle Guy was properly taken aback.
His face clouded over. “Maybe you better take your hand off her knee,” he growled.
“Did you have a good workout?” said a
cheerful, familiar voice behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. It was Linda,
getting into the hot tub.
It took a few seconds to process. By
the time I did, Muscle Guy was standing. His wife, upon whose knee my hand
currently rested, remained seated. She wanted a good view of the homicide about
to take place.
Profuse apologies on my part, and the
fact Muscle Guy’s wife was a spot-on doppelgänger
for my Linda, were the only things that saved my life that day.
Moral of the story? Like the Georgia
Satellite song says, “Keep your hands to yourself.”
(616) 730-1414
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