May 25, 1985: the Dinner Date

We’d met at a business meeting April 15 and had several meetings and a lunch date. He went out of town for a conference, and then we made a date for dinner.

He showed up with a box of Frango mints from Marshall Field in Chicago, happy to show he’d noticed when I said I liked them.

He also brought a bouquet of mixed stems…a large allium, a blue delphinium, a handful of pinks and purples and whites and greens. I popped them into a vase, thinking I shouldn’t dawdle. But he arranged them, saying we should take a moment to appreciate them at their best. It was a point he would make often.

Allium

The day had been sunny and warm, and the restaurant seated us at an outdoor booth, with an open arbor above our heads. Before long, it began to drizzle. He went off to ask that we move indoors, and when he came back he sat next to me, protecting my head with his jacket while we waited for an inside table.

Pointing out that he had revealed more about his life than I had about mine, he asked many questions. When I told him at some length about my mother, who had died five years earlier, I found myself crying a little. Damn. What is this? I hardly know this man, and yet I’m so unguarded I’ve slipped right into tears. On our lunch date, he’d had a catch in his voice while talking about his father. At the time, I’d been a little skeptical about his sincerity, but here I was, and I knew I was not playing a game.

Delphinium

He called a couple of days later. It was Memorial Day, and he was taking his nine-year-old daughter to roller-skate around one Lake Harriet. Abby skated while Peter and I walked, and we stopped periodically to chat. She was bright, energetic, mature, polite, and charming. I couldn’t tell what she thought of me, but she was being nice and I hoped we were hitting it off.

Apparently she hadn’t thought much of some of the other women he had dated. And there were lots of them. He told me he’d spent the last couple of years looking pretty seriously for someone to settle down with. I wasn’t looking; I had learned to enjoy my own company, something I thought everyone should be able to do. I had settled comfortably into single life with two cats in a house I’d just purchased, and which I loved.

We made a date for the following Friday night, and then the Thursday after that. On one of those evenings, we went to a Mexican restaurant and emerged into one of those long Minnesota evenings when the setting sun turns half the sky rosy red. As we reached the car, he said, “I’m going to throw a monkey wrench into your well ordered life.”

I felt my face blush as red as the setting sun.