"You are the butter to my bread, breath of my life."
— Paul Child to his wife Julia, in the movie, Julie and Julia
Dear Steven,
Happy Valentine's Day. It is a day for flowers and whispers of sweet nothings. It is a day for romance and twitterpating. It is a day dedicated to love. This seems like a good time to tell you about how Dad and I met, how you eventually came to be.
Dad and I met at the Baptist Student Center cafeteria in Carbondale. Dad worked there as a dish-washer and I dished out the (sometimes recognizable) fare that the cafeteria offered. It was a late Sunday morning in January after the breakfast shift.
I was pouring myself a cup of coffee. It was one of those industrial coffee dispensers with a spigot and a drain hole at the bottom to catch spills. I noticed the scruffy dish-washer, badly in need of a shower and a haircut, wearing a plaid fleece shirt over a worn T-shirt, waiting next to me.
I had arrived just weeks ago: a Malaysian girl who had never been out of her zip code by herself, who had always been chauffeured and chaperoned everywhere; a well-coddled tropical princess who was displaced 10,000 miles and 13 time zones away, very homesick and very cold. I was happy to have the cafeteria job. It brought in pocket-money and it kept me from weeping in my dorm room wondering why I was sent to this god-forsaken country instead of England or Australia where all my friends went.
"Coffee?", I ask. He grunts a guttural sound and hands me his coffee mug, and I pour.I find out much later that Dad was suffering a well-deserved hangover. To his credit, he graciously sat with me, nursed his coffee, and made very small conversation.
And that was it. No fireworks, no cardiac aerobics, no love at first sight. I was not looking for love. I was looking to get my higher education done in the shortest possible time so that I could go back home to my coddled life... where the boys were not so scruffy-looking and were better groomed... my best-laid plan.
But your father has magical powers of persuasion. He charmed me with plush stuffed green frogs, ginger snaps in my mailbox, kite-flying afternoons and meteor-hunting nights. He introduced me to the constellation Orion, the Pleiades star cluster, water elephants, haikus, Booby's sandwiches and vodka. He brought poetry and Led Zepellin and Nietzsche into my ordered life. Nietzsche who? He made my small world bigger and scarier, but oh, so much more fun. He makes me laugh.
And he made the Disco Queen fall in love with a grassroot member of Insane Coho Lips. Pretty insane, huh?!?
I know that this is not the world's greatest love story. It may not even be a good story, but it is our story. We gladly share this with you until you have one of your own.
Love,
Mom and Dad
