NOTES TOWARD A THIRD ACT
NOTES TOWARD A THIRD ACT
The Greatest Love Of All
Friday, November 13, 2015
October 16, 2015
"Wait, wait. What did you say? Why were we never told of this?" interjects Jack, our middle boy, one night at the dinner table a couple of years back.
I answer with a 75/25 mix of genuine amusement and poorly concealed chagrin, "Well, it wasn't like we were keeping anything from you. It just never came up. We had nothing to hide. And just to make it clear, yes, we met when I was a substitute teacher, and your mother was in ninth grade. And no, of course there was no monkey business. But I gotta say the way the whole thing unfolded was enough to make you believe in fate."
"That's right!" his mother seconds in a voice reserved for such faux ironic, which is to say over-the-top sincere, pronouncements, "It's the greatest love story ever told!"
**
This bombshell, such as it is, had been casually dropped into dinner conversation: "You know," their mother says, "when I was in high school I always looked so old for my age. Sometimes I was accused of being a narc." She goes on to tell the story of how she walked into the boy's bathroom on her first day of high school, and since the theme tying all these threads together is high school embarrassments — it being Jack's first week of high school — Julie launches into one of her favorite tales: the time the substitute teacher was taking roll in her Spanish class, and stopped cold once he got to her name and noticed her grade.
"I remember he said, 'Stand up!' Then he said something like, 'Do you mean to tell me you're in ninth grade?!?' Then he shook his head and said I could sit down. David Rosenbaum, who was a senior in the same class, looked at me and raised his eyebrows, like 'Woo woo.'"
"I still don't believe I did that," I say, "I really don't think I would embarrass a student like that."
"Oh, you did it all right," Julie says.
At which point, I respond, "Well, you always did look mature for your age," and Jack is off to the races.
**
What to make of this? Is it, as Julie is so fond of putting it, "The Greatest Love Story Ever Told?" And if so, what makes it so great?
Is it the fact she was enough of a person to me that when Julie moved to live on Lake Michigan with her family midway through her sophomore year, I noticed her absence and asked her friend Heather, who would be Maid of Honor at our wedding, "Hey, what happened to Julie Boyer?" The fact of her apotheosis in Laura Ashley, shorn and transformed, the one time our paths crossed in Battle Creek a year and a half later?
Is it the fact that a year after this when Julie had entered The University of Michigan School of Nursing, we ran into each other on campus in Ann Arbor where I had moved to attend grad school? Or is it the fact that a couple months later while passing through the English Department office, she just happened to see my name by my cubicle and so left a note on my desk to say Hi and that I should give her a call if I wanted to have coffee sometime? Or the fact that I looked up her number and left a message before she could even get back to her dorm room? Is it the fact that I still remember the green trench coat she wore to that first coffee date, the way her eyes did this extremely appealing back-and-forth back-and-forth thing that made it impossible for me to stop looking into them?
Or is it the fact that even then, from our first actual date, some molecule within me knew?
**
So yeah, Jack, your mother and I met when she was in ninth grade, and I was a substitute teacher. And no, of course there was no monkey business.
But if you are inclined to view the world in such a manner, and I will admit that I am, I don't think it's too much of a reach to assert that something was going on beyond the simple floundering of a ninth grade girl and a substitute teacher, as they tried to make their way through the world and found themselves being drawn, as if by some force — call it fate, if you will — beyond their ability to perceive or comprehend, together.
“So yeah, Jack, your mother and I met when she was in ninth grade, and I was a substitute teacher. And no, of course there was no monkey business.”