Really Dave’s idea of great date involved our basement and pizza delivery. No formalities, no suffering through new waitresses or the fry cook learning his trade. None of the unease involved when two people with three stepchildren, four aging parents, twenty-eight rabbits, two cars, one gorgeous but needy and remote recreational property sit down across a table from each other. After all, what’s wrong with dating in your comfortable jeans and fuzzy moccasins; favorite chair, fluffy comforter and private bathroom handy. And the makings for a dessert float right upstairs: one carton of ice cream, one can of root beer, a big spoon, and a sturdy kitchen towel wrapped under and around the carton to catch the drips.
And at the end of most work days, I was every bit as ready to be at home—to take off those damn panty hose as fast as I could, ditch my bra, eat without the fuss of going out. Or addressing some lifelong angst. After all, I’d been too nervous to eat on any of my, maybe, dozen dates in college.
Plus, that basement pizza came with the peace of gentle routine. Familiar jokes for which Dave had predictable and rewarding punchlines. He’d wait patiently, for instance, for the last intoned line in a Cialis ad, “Call your doctor for an erection lasting more than four hours” to say, “yeah right, you wish.” And we were good at filling lackluster basketball quarters or dull commercials with the trials of our Historical Society work days. Dave remembered which Forest Service ranger district our office currently battled over the survival of a backcountry homestead. I understood which intense genealogists—in those pre-Ancestry.com days—proved most vexing for him. We commiserated over the same egregiously manipulative agency director. When Dave muted a particularly bad sports announcer, we even broached the knottier decisions involving rabbits, the in-laws, the kids, the North Fork. Surrounded by 1950s tile, a pegboard wall, a third of Dave’s five thousand books, and Emily and Amanda’s projects, we mostly held each other in ordinary, quiet respect and contentment. From Grandma Kitty’s sofa fellowship on upstairs to spooning.
But of course I longed for Dave to take me out. Date nights for married couples were a new rage. In the basement, our eyes paralleled to the TV. Restaurant tables required eye contact. And offered the impetus of lengthening silences to speak of the problems for which we had no easy solutions. An outing came with the ceremonies of caring—an offered arm across the parking lot, a softer smile, a tease that only we’d understand, a twinkle of innuendo. Being seen in public. And, even with their constrictions, wearing the clothes that invited our better selves, dressing up for each other.
Mostly though, it was all about being asked. Being sought, wooed. Not having to share Dave with the Green Bay Packers, a ninth inning triple, or Mulder’s sudden switch in X-File tactics. Mattering enough to be seen and heard.
In the last month of his life, Dave took me out to eat three times—each shyly-offered, spur-of-the-moment invitations. And brought to the table for a leisurely hour his mischievous eyes and knowing smile. The chemistry of his stroke? I choose not to think so. Maybe foretelling?
I love the camaraderie of friends who frame our visits in books and art and memory. And with whom I can share a quiet table of literal and figurative light. Still, many evenings now I prefer to rummage in the refrigerator for enough oddities to build a meal and tuck up with a book. Suddenly as much a homebody as Dave was.
I trust in the mystery of Dave’s knowing that I needed to store up for a long eternity the memory of his laughter across the table, the reach of his hand along my back as we slid into a booth. I trust, too, in the gift he offered night in and night out of sweet routine, the camaraderie of ordinary lives intertwined by all the skills and habits and histories we brought to that basement. ©
