Ships in the night

I live in my own skin so I’m not privy to the inner life of others. About once in every long while, maybe a year, I cross the path of someone I believe with absolute certainty I could make happy and be happy with. I suspect this happens to everybody. As life twists and spins I am suddenly looking at this woman and she is looking at me with the same certainty. She’s perfect. My every nerve ending is reaching for her. Generally one or both of us are in a relationship we want to keep so it goes no further or for one reason or another it simply isn’t going to happen. Life gets in the way. If I’m happy in a relationship I avoid this innocent woman’s siren call for me to mess my life up again. The worst (best?) was in Oregon when my daughter was about 4. This woman was a friend of my drummer’s wife. I was living in a town where most of the musicians met each other in constantly shifting bands and formed a loose society of friends and acquaintances. We would cross paths at the grocery store, parties and gigs. She taught at my daughter’s preschool, not my daughter’s class thank God. I contrived to walk past her classroom door every morning after dropping my daughter off for a second of eye contact. We never spoke. For a year or so we circled each other but never spoke. My wife and I separated. A few weeks later I was waiting in a bus shelter trying to keep out of the Oregon rain. She pulled her car up at the curb in front of me and opened the door. We looked at each other. I got up and into her car. She pulled back into traffic. No one spoke until she said without taking her eyes from the road “Where to?” I said “Just drive.” We ended up at a rest stop along the freeway just North of town. We sat at a picnic table under a big tree and talked. The rain stopped. The sky cleared. The sun went down and the stars came out. And we talked. We talked about everything we wanted to talk about all those times we couldn’t. It came out like a flood when the dam breaks. It turns out she noticed I usually passed her classroom door about the same time each morning and tried to be at the head of the room each morning so she could catch my eye. The upshot of it all was that she was moving to Canada the next day. There was no question of me leaving my daughter to follow her. The next day I drove her to the airport. I stood at the window watching her plane rise and disappear into the clouds. There hasn’t been anything like such a spectacular near miss since then. The encounters still occur semi-regularly. They’re still powerful but I know how to handle them now. At this point I’m drawn to grown women with a real life she’s put together with a lot of effort. Sometimes she has children, a career, a home, frequently a relationship that may not sparkle anymore but is stable, an underestimated virtue. For far too long I was unfaithful to some good women taking these attractions to their illogical conclusion. Now when it occurs we smile at each other with a mingling of mutual attraction and nervousness, avoid being alone together then go our separate ways as soon as possible. If I’m in a relationship I am extra solicitous to her that night to remind myself that I am happy. Staring at the ceiling before going to sleep I admit my mind wanders. I wonder if she’s doing the same thing in another bed across town. Then I kiss the sleeping woman next to me who mumbles something that might be “I love you” before going to sleep myself. Growing up is a long, painful, ongoing process but it’s worth it.

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