Melissa’s Birthday

It’s my wife’s birthday today. She’s turning sixty-six. We fell in love forty-three years ago when she was twenty-three and I was twenty-four. I sported a full beard and long curly hair—she favored denim dresses, long dark hair and cowboy boots. Our dream was to grow old together and I guess we’ve pretty much succeeded.

Melissa and I met when we were the two co-coordinators in charge of running a storefront food co-op in Middletown, CT. We ordered the food (beans, nuts and whole grains), coordinated the scores of volunteers, kept the books (double entry in manual ledgers) and once a week each traveled up to Hartford at four a.m. to buy fresh vegetables from the farmer’s market. (For our subsequent wedding, Beck’s Brothers Banana’s gave us a case of bananas and Patty, where we bought most of our produce gave us a discount on twenty pounds of zucchini to make zucchini boats from a recipe in the Moosewood Cookbook for the reception dinner.)

We worked together for several months before I was willing to admit how much I liked her. I figured we needed to talk about it so I called a meeting for us to talk about the ‘situation.’ I remember screwing up my courage as we were drinking herbal tea one afternoon in the kitchen of her communal apartment. I confessed to her that she was my ideal of a woman – so smart, funny, beautiful, passionate and deeply trustworthy. She, fortunately reciprocated in kind. But, I went on, because we were co-workers, we definitely shouldn’t risk our working relationship and the co-op by acting on our feelings for each other. Melissa agreed (reluctantly it later turned out) and the ‘situation’ was ‘settled’.

That lasted for a couple weeks, till the evening we ‘had to’ go after work to pick up some new shades for the storefront window from a neighboring town. I don’t recall exactly what happened, but I have a vague and slightly thrilling memory of kissing in the car and both admitting to the reality that not being together was not going to work.

We kept our newly acknowledged relationship a secret for a while, but eventually decided we needed to tell our bosses, the governing board. We carefully prepared what we would say and were ready for whatever they might ask of us. But, after our nervous profession of our serious and passionate intentions toward each other, the members of the board just smiled. One of them then kindly informed us that the two of us had been the last to know this open secret of our mutual attraction.

So today, I’ve carefully wrapped a small stack of presents and put them where she will see them when she gets up. We were going to go into Waltham to go out to dinner with our daughter and her family. That’s not happening. I had bought tickets for the March 28^th show of the traveling production of The Band’s Visit in Boston. That’s not happening. Melissa’s idea from yesterday was to order out for pizza tonight.   We’ll have to read the papers and make our risk assessment and see if that’s possible. Maybe I’ll end up cooking the birthday dinner myself.