Blog Prompts, pt. 3

Your best or your most embarrassing date with Julie

The most embarrassing is probably the easiest to come up with. During my last week of undergraduate J and I had been dating for just a few months, and the future was very murky for us. I was going to move to Chicago, she was going to be in Rochester. We had tried to figure out whether we could see much of each other during the summer, and it didn't look good. I needed to work, and the only work I could find was in Rochester, a miserable job doing early drive-thru shifts at a Tim Hortons. J's work was going to be in Pennsylvania, and there wouldn't be much time for either of us to travel. I don't think either of was thinking "this is the end," but much was uncertain.

I had planned a nice date for us before we said good bye for the summer and then possibly much longer afterward. I made a reservation at a nice restaurant down in Henrietta, scrounged through my disheveled apartment (I was moving later in the week) for some dress clothes, and told her I'd pick her up at her dorm for dinner. I wasn't sure what we'd talk about. Would she be weepy about saying good-bye? Would she be all excited to go home and go to the camp where she'd be working? How was I supposed to feel about all this? Would she miss me over the summer? Would I want her to be miserable missing me? Were we really going to try to live like this for the foreseeable future? And where on earth were my truck keys?

Actually, where were my truck keys?

Since campus was just a few hundred yards away I rarely had need to drive my green 97 Ford Ranger, so it had been several days since I'd needed to take it anywhere. I looked at the clock and saw that I should be leaving if I were to pick up J in time. I started rooting through boxes. I looked under the bed. I looked in my coat pockets. Nothing.

I called her once I was a few minutes late, and she walked over to my very messy apartment to help me look. This was not how I'd envisioned the evening going. We moved heaps of dirty laundry, opened up all the boxes I'd taped shut, and found nothing. About a half hour later I called to cancel our reservation.

We ended up walking to the diner down the street. She was in uncomfortable shoes, and I think the weather turned ugly. We played cards there and chit-chatted, but the evening never turned into any except a few hands of Phase 10 while we waited for our soup and me occasionally saying "I wonder if I put them in the desk drawer?" and J telling me that she had looked there.

We don't have many chances nowadays to improve on our "best date" experiences, although I can say that, though further apart, the quality of our dates is much better now that we're married. I think both of us are at a point, what with the house and everything, that our idea of a date night is much more about saving the money that would be spent on a babysitter and dinner out towards a new can of paint or a kitchen island and staying in with brownies and Netflix. It's also become much harder to find a true night free since I've transitioned into full time work with the orchestra. I have a concert at least one night every weekend, and sometimes I'll be booked solid from Thursday-Saturday night, with rehearsals in the other evenings. So "date night" for us is actually usually something along the lines of having a nice conversation in our sweats on a Tuesday at 10:30 AM while James peers into the window of the carwash.

We did have a great date a few months ago, though. I arranged a babysitter, and we both dressed up in our nicest non-concert clothes. (It feels wrong to put on a tux or a plain black suit to go out on a date.) I had bought a very nice ring for J that I knew she was interested in (It ended up not fitting, so we returned it) and we had a fancy dinner overlooking the canal at Aladdin's in Pittsford. We took a nice walk after dinner, then drove out to see a movie in Henrietta. Just dinner and a movie. But it was the only chance we'd had for dinner and a movie since James was born--it was a Tuesday evening, and neither of us had rehearsal--and it was the only dinner and a movie we've done since.