The Taco Traveler

Preamble: Yes, this is (currently) 12 years old, and my youngest son is almost the age of the little boy in the story. Wow, time flies....
 

Post Long-Distance Blind Date Ramblings
For all my friends because I'm a big fat blabber-mouth.

03/21/96 9:17 PM

Okay, I'm going to ramble for a while here because I promised a full report to many of you regarding the blind date I just flew to Boise for. But because I've got such an overwhelming feeling of goodness right now (sorry about that), and because that feeling isn't necessarily because of the date, itself, I have to go beyond the date's scope. Please, either be patient or delete - I have to get this stuff out. I'll try to keep it clear, but I'm also trying to keep Edgar happy by returning his clicks, "rerro"s and "whayadoon"s over my shoulder, so I may get scrambled. There - I just gave him a peanut, so he should be okay for a little while.

I've had three major spurts of writing in my life. The first was when I first fell in love, and I kept a journal in which I wrote sappy stuff that back then I called "poetry:"

. . .
I try to keep my thoughts at bay,
At least until that Summer soon.
When I see her beginning June. . .
Thoughts spoken on that longer stay.
. . .

When that kind of writing was over, I didn't write again until the relationship that started that writing was over. I wrote essays instead of journal entries, and fairly good poems instead of bad (I think they were better because they were darker and more black-turtleneck coffeeshop kind of poems). The third time is now, and the reason I feel like writing now and lately is that I feel, more and more, that my life would make a fairly comical screenplay, where the first and last scenes look something like this:

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SCENE ONE

Players:

Lauren: Sister, 28-ish.
Rochelle: Sister, 24-ish.
Me: 27-ish.
Parents cleaning up in the kitchen or something; they never appear, but we know they're there.

Fade in to a Christmas scene - wrapping paper and ribbons strewn about; decorated tree drying out by the fire.

L & R are huddled around S - with the passing of the scene below, they grow more and more excited, talking over each other as they realize the are visualizing the same scene. As they begin describing what they see, the imaginary scene takes over in a cloudy, dreamy frame.

R: Well, I see you with someone very specific: she's got dark brown hair, straight and kinda shoulder length, like Phoebe Cates . . .

L: And blue or green eyes, very pretty . . .

S: (smiling, but with sarcasm) But on the Ouija board Elvis said she'd be a brown-eyed blonde.

L: I'm serious! And she's really smart . . .

R: And she's like, reading a book on a white sofa with her legs tucked beneath her

L: . . . in a metropolitan flat, and you can see a sky-line out these big huge picture windows.

R: And she's wearing academic-looking glasses, and satiny pajamas.

L: And she's drinking a glass of red wine.

R: (dreamily) Yeah. . . .

SCENE THE LAST

Begin airplane noises (blind date was previously discussed in film: father met this girl on a plane trip ("Are you single?" "I have a son. . . .")

Fade in to close-up of , well, Me. Just like Dustin Hoffman at the beginning of "The Graduate," looking kind of numb/worried/open-eyed-unconscious.

Ride from Boise airport to the Airport Holiday Inn.

Check in. Long walk to room.

Call The Date, Michelle. Phone conversation is casual, as they've spoken several times before.

S: Hi!
M: You here?
S: Yep. You ready?
M: Mmm hmm.
S: Wanna meet in the bar?
M: You still wouldn't recognize me. I have your picture.
S: Oh. Yeah.
M: What number are you in?
S: 505
M: 505 - Wow! You're way over there. Why don't you come to my room?
S: Okay. Number. . .
M: 215
S: Be right there.

Hair check, tooth-brush, armpit-check. Deep breath. Begin purposeful walk down endlessly long corridor to her room. Pan to numbers on doors as they flash by: 257-255-253. Amplify breathing. Pan other side of hallway: 230-228-226. Close-up: bead of sweat. 221-219-217 . . . Gasp - as the door that should be 215 has no number - it's a housekeeping closet. Two more steps: 215.

Two quick knocks. Peephole goes dark and then light again as the chain is unchained. Door opens. It's the girl from L & R's imagination in Scene One.

M: Hi.

Face shot of, well, Me. Grin grows wider. Much blushing, joy, & merriment are had by all. Happy Hollywood ending.

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So, you know what? Things don't always go like they do in the movies. Michelle wasn't really The One, though she is really super-nice and we managed to get along great and keep the awkward lapses in conversation to a minimum. The long walk down the corridor is totally true, right down to the housekeeping closet that freaked me out because it's where 215 should have been. We had dinner at Olive Garden and then went searching for a movie to see, since there was nothing else going on in Boise (this morning, I asked the girl at the front desk if she had a rack of those brochures full of things to do in Boise, and she said "Sure!" and went around a corner and came back with two brochures, both of which told me the best places to go shopping. One brochure was actually entitled: "OUTLET SHOPPING IN BOISE!"). We couldn't find a movie we wanted to see, so we ended up just sitting in her room (cause she had a business-person's kind of suite with a couch), drinking a bottle of chardonnay, and watching Sylvester Stallone's "Assassins" on Pay-Per-View. No romance - just getting to know each other.

Today I woke up at 8 and went to her room, then we went down to breakfast. Then she went to work (she's a traveling salesperson - I've got a whole heapin' handful of CIBA contact lens eye drops if anyone wants a bottle) while I sat around writing and playing pool in the Holiday Inn Holodome: wooooo!

When she got back from visiting her opthamologists we went and played miniature golf and HORSE (basketball). We split the golf (I won one round; she won the other), and I crushed her mercilessly at HORSE.

We had lunch at Red Robin (I had a guacamole burger; she had a chicken Caesar), and then we sat around talking at the airport for an hour or so before her flight. She said (only half-joking, I think) that I should meet her next week when she goes to Missoula. I said "Right. Let me know when business takes you to Las Vegas." I told her I was planning a big tour of all my buddies in California late in the summer after my Jeep comes in, and that I'd divert my course to Utah because there's some great 4x4 trails there.

In sum: I'm sure we'll just be long-distance buddies.

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The best part of this trip came on the plane-ride home, where I sat next to this little dude named Michael: a cute little guy, 5 or 6 years old and really smart, polite, and talkative. His dad put him on the plane to go visit his mom in Seattle, and I ended up being essentially his babysitter for the hour-and-a-half flight. A beautiful young stewardess came by and gave him a couple coloring/activity books and Michael and I spent the entire plane ride talking about stuff like Jurassic Park and the virtues of Sega over Nintendo. (The stewardess--to answer your question--though she seemed impressed by how well I got along with Michael, also had a humongous rock on her finger). Michael insisted that his grandma has seen live dinosaurs because she's almost a hundred years old. He said this just after he also acknowledged that dinosaurs went extinct 10 million years ago:

"She's seen 'em! In cages!"

"Like in a zoo?"

"Yeah. And the T-Rex almost got out. He was like: Rrrraaaagh! against the cage when she was there. But the Stegasaurus just walks around."

"Oh. He's tame, and people like, pet him?"

"Yeah." He takes a big gulp of Pepsi, finishing it off.

"You know what?" he asks.

"Huh?"

"I like riding in riding in riding in planes cause you get to do stuff like like. . . like. I'm not sposed to have pop. Mom says it makes me crrrrrraaaaAAAYYYYZEEEEEE!"

Here's what's put me in such a good mood, and made me decide to write all this stuff down tonight: I was showing Michael how to apply the tattoos that come on the wrappers of his Fruit Stripe Gum (I told him: "When you see your mom at the gate, say 'Look, Mom! I love you so much I got tattoos for you!"). At one point he said to me, out of the blue: "You're the nicest person in the whole world. I can't wait to see my mom and say 'Hey, Mom, this is my friend.'"

Near touch-down, Michael saw a lady across the aisle putting on lipstick, and he pointed her out to me. He said: "I think girls are pretty when they put lipstick and stuff on."

I said: "Yeah, I think so, too, but I also think they're pretty when they don't put lipstick and stuff on. You know what, though? I bet that lipstick would make a really good, bright-red tattoo for you to show your mom." He looked more intently at the woman putting on the lipstick. He seemed distant and dreamy, maybe appreciative.

"Yeah," he said.