When people get old, dear children, they may begin to accidentally omit key pieces of relevant data from their cherished anecdotes or they might embellish the fragments still somehow lodged into the crumbling passageways of their feeble minds. Or both, such as in this short story of the early days of the loving relationship between your dear mother and myself. I may or may not be missing factoids crucial to the proper retelling of this fairy tale. I also might have punched up, just a wee bit, for dramatic effect, a thing here and or a thing there. Still, this is us, your mom and me, and without it there’d be no you. So read it and remember it, because we won’t for much longer. You’re our only hope.

*****

It would be hard to imagine two people coexisting in closer proximity without being an item (do kids still use that term? how old am I, exactly?) than your mother and I did for nearly a year before we first held hands, first shared a Haagen-Daaz milkshake, and first confided in each other our wildest hopes and dreams over a gigantic slice of Lorenzo’s Pizza on South Street. We worked banker’s hours together every weekday with only 18 inches of desk space separated us until even that foot and a half wide imaginary wall crumbled at the bank’s annual holiday party in 1998. There, your mother found me irresistible in that too tight olive green suit I’d had since I was a teenager. And who could blame her, I was pretty hot. Despite never hitting the dance floor as a pair that night, the twinkle in our eyes and shy conversations on our tongues made it obvious to everyone around us that something magical was about to happen. It took another couple of days before we’d make it official over a bowl of slippery noodles neither of us understood how to eat with chopsticks, and then a few more before we knew for certain that we’d never share a dessert or a slice of pizza or an Asian Fusion noddle bowl with anyone else ever again.

Also, it is very possible that our relationship was centered too much around food. Hence all the trips to the gym your mother and I made while you were growing up.

*****

Photo of Jill and I taken with the Samsung NX300 by David Guest of LifeofDad.com