Loring, a Writing Life

17: All Writers Need Love

Time has been a tad muddled as I’ve written these posts, but so far I’ve given a decent taste of what my life in Loring was like. Now, though, let’s get the time line straightened out for what comes next.

I’d finished my graduate program and rediscovered my calling to teach and write. I’d had the heart attack. My affair with the animal rights woman and the sad farm girl were, as we say, in the rear view mirror. The Tibetans needed me less and less. And my work at Metro State had actually increased. Not only was I teaching courses there—both composition and something called Metro 101, which was a course on how to be a student for returning adult students—but I’d also signed on to tutor struggling writers in their Writing Center.

And I had a good friend there. Bright, funny, creative, a great conversationalist, about my age, an absolute hoot, Karen became an instant friend.

One Thursday I came in to a slow Center day. Karen and I sat there talking and waiting for some woebegone student to limp in begging us to cure him of his criminally terrible writing. Then, out of the blue, Karen mentioned that she had just the woman for me. “She’s a nice Jewish girl,” she said.

“You’re a nice Jewish girl,” I shot back. “Is it you?” Karen is completely, irrevocably married to Fred, so it was a completely smartass response.

She ignored it. “You’ll love her,” she said.

“But I’m not Jewish,” I reminded her.

“You have a Jewish soul,” she told me.

I waved this off. It was time for a break from all that, I told her. I needed a vacation from romance. She was wasting her time. Such a yenta. But she persisted. The woman’s name was Sandy. A cute redhead. Lively. I’d love her. We’d hit it off, she was certain.

“Funny,” I said. “I danced a couple of dances with a woman named Sandy this past Saturday night.”

“Ha! What kind of dancing!” She was out of her chair and ready to wrestle me to the floor for an answer. “Come on! What kind of dancing!”

I told her Cajun dancing.

She ran in circles flailing her arms. “She dances Cajun!”

I still objected. “But she was with some guy,” I said. “Older. Vaguely distinguished looking.”

“Oh, him! Just a friend. You have to go out with her!”

This went on for a while. Finally, I excused myself to go into another office to get some of my teaching work taken care of. There’s always something to be worked on when you have a class of students. Adult students can be pretty demanding. About ten minutes later Karen appeared at my office door with a long, troubled look on her face. “You have to come with me,” she said. By the look on her mug, there must have been a death in her family. I followed her into her office.

She handed me her phone and said, “Say hello to Sandy,” then left the room and closed the door. I had to say hello.

A cheerful voice thanked me for the dances and off we went. We agreed that we would take a walk around one of the lakes some time, and, yeah, that Karen sure was something, wasn’t she?

 I thought, well, that was nice. A funny coincidence. One of us would call and set that up. I don’t think we made any firm plans and I thought little about it for the next day, a Friday.

I had plans to go out to dinner with my friends Nick and Lesley. As I was getting ready to leave, my phone rang. It was Sandy telling me that there was a CD release party at a place called Patrick’s and she and some friends would be there. Klezmer music. Would I like to meet them there? I said I would check with my friends. Maybe after dinner we would come over. Could be fun.

So after dinner we headed over to Patrick’s. Mind you, I’m pretty seriously bald and back then I pulled what little hair I have back into a rat’s tail trying to be cool. And I hadn’t exactly dressed up for dinner. I wore a T-shirt and cut-off jeans and sneakers with no socks. I wasn’t dressed for a date. When we arrived, we saw Fred and Karen sitting at a table with Sandy and some guy who had his arm around the back of her chair.

Well, we sat down, and the usual introductions were made. I was introduced as an “English teacher,” which I have never been, but never mind. It was all fairly pleasant aside from the smoke that came out of the ears of the guy sitting next to Sandy. Since I was an “English teacher,” he had some grammatical issues he wanted to have me straighten out for him. I told him I was off duty. More smoke poured out of his ears. The band was playing a waltz. “You two should dance,” Karen suggested, not for the first time. “Okay,” I said, with a side leer to smokey guy.

So we danced a solo. Nobody else got up to join us. We whirled around doing a cross between a Viennese and a cowboy waltz for a crowd of fifty or sixty onlookers. I made it so flamboyant that we almost knocked over the vocalist’s microphone. As we one-two-threed, one-two-threed past the table, I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of the smokey guy’s hair on fire. When we returned to our seats, Karen was in tears. “It’s just like a wedding,” she sobbed. “I’m all furklempt!”

A couple days later Sandy and I took a walk and ended it sitting on a park bench talking. “You know,” she said, “you’d look really good with short hair and a goatee.”

“I’ll have it for you by next weekend,” I said.

That was twenty-two years ago and we just keep getting better and better.