"Despise Not The Day Of Small Things"

Saturday morning Ginny & I went out to breakfast at Denny’s and found the place so crowded and the staff so rushed that when we found a booth there was no placemat on the table.

What a drag.

I love restaurant placemats. For as long as I can remember I’ve had the habit of turning the placemats over and drawing little pictures on the white side. I draw stick figures of birds or elephants or scrolls or camels or anything the conversations around me suggest. I do this almost unconsciously while paying close attention to the person I’m with as we talk. Ginny finds this amusing.

When the food arrives at the table I flip the placemat back over and the world tragically looses another example of great art.

But our table had no placemat yesterday.

The harried waitress did stop to tell us that she’s changing jobs and moving to another restaurant a few miles away and we promised to go there next week to see her in her new environment.

Now, here’s an odd thing.

Neither Ginny nor I can remember first meeting.

We are deeply in love and we’ve been married for 38 years but we can’t remember when we first met. We were both connected with a large church youth group back in the 1960s and to each of us, for the longest time the other was just part of the crowd, background noise to the group’s activities.

So it was definitely not a case of love at first sight.

There wasn’t any first sight.

But one night after a prayer meeting, the gang went to a Hot Shoppe restaurant and packed around a couple of tables pushed together to make room for everybody. Being the shy person I am, I wrangled a place in the corner so I didn’t have to speak to anybody. I turned over my placemat and began to draw as usual not really paying attention to the others who were engaged in animated conversations.

A hand with a pencil appeared at the edge of my vision and began adding features to my drawing. It was this girl seated beside me. This shy girl who never had anything to say in group meetings. I’d seen her around but I didn’t even know her name. I drew a hammer. She drew a house. I drew an alligator. She drew a squirrel.

Neither of us spoke a word for the longest time….

And out of such a small beginning grew a lifelong friendship, a torrid love affair, a joyous companionship, a thriving family, a contented old age.

There’s no particular point to this posting…

I’m just remembering.

And smiling.