A Trip Back in Time

I've thought a lot about my first posts, and where I was going with this whole project, and now I realize that if I ever intend to put together the book this story deserves, this is where it needs to happen. And where else to start the story of my life with Rox than at the beginning.

It was August 14, 1992. For me it was just like any other day at that stage of my life. I had been in San Jose a year, waiting tables and gigging with my jazz combo, LMNOP, at local venues, but mostly at the ultra-hip and sadly short-lived Ajax Lounge. It was Friday night, and I was working a shift in the trendy little Willow Street Wood-Fired Pizza in Willow Glen, San Jose's original suburb that had evolved into one of those charming, old-growth neighborhoods everyone wants to live in. It was a typically bustling night, lots of turnover of tables, people ordering and drinking generously, lots of spirited back and forth between me and my co-workers.

It was that night that Rox walked into my life. Unlike me, this was not an ordinary night for her. That very night, Alex and Owen were attending their father's second wedding, and Rox was out with friends to celebrate her newfound independence. Fate, in the funny way it works, put her at a table where she'd be served by the father of her future child--me.

It's been so long now, I can hardly remember what attracted me to her initially. Was it her flighty, sexy persona? Was it her unblemished skin? Perhaps it was the raucous, infectious laugh? It was probably all those things, and more, along with the fact that she was crazy, which, as my history illustrates, is an intangible quality that draws me like a bee to honey, at my peril, of course.

What I do remember from that night: She and her friends ordered a couple of bottles of Chardonnay (blech); at my recommendation, she ate my favorite Willow Street dish--the fettucini with chicken in tequila cream sauce; when it came time for her to leave, I handed her a card with my number on it and asked for a hug, which she grudgingly agreed to; and after she was gone, one of the waitresses, who I'd told that I thought Rox would never call me, urged me to go after her and say something else, so I ran out onto our patio and shouted to her down the street, "Roxann, I'll be really disappointed if you don't call."

Rox always insisted it was those words that turned things, that she never would have called me otherwise. Ah, I could write a book about the combination of pain and pleasure, joy and sadness, craziness and insanity, and love and hate that resulted from those critical 15 seconds. Or a blog.