Thursday, January 9, 2014

Before These Boobs Were Yours

 
This morning striations of blush and bruise across the 7:30am sky.  Five degrees felt balmy, felt like occasion to remove my hat, to back the car out of the driveway without letting it choke out a little warmth first.

This morning, after I folded laundry and wrote a grocery list and you manhandled a number of rattles, shakers, crinkle books, and stuffed dragons, we went to Econofoods.  In addition to purchasing the usual items we also bought a violet orchid (thin little neck thrust out plaintively), two bags of Reece's peanut butter hearts (thank GOD the Valentine's display is already complete), and a Disney princess helium balloon.  These items we delivered to Daddy's class because today or a day like today is our kind-of anniversary.


We don't remember the exact date I walked into Daddy's classroom eight years ago, but it was at the beginning of January term.  Only eight years ago Daddy's class was in the basement of Boe Chapel and I didn't know what Daddy looked like.  I only knew that when I asked my brother John whether the prof teaching his interim course was "young, single, and attractive" that John answered "maybe" and so, en route from Minneapolis to Iowa City, I stopped by St. Olaf and sat next to John around a seminar table and waited for his maybe young, single and attractive professor to walk in. 

I knew the professor's name was Peder and so I was expecting someone with white blond hair and translucent-pale skin, someone thin and wiry (I say "so" as if that expectation made sense though clearly it did not).  Instead a gorgeously handsome man entered: relatively thin but not wiry, with dark hair and shocking blue eyes.  He was wearing a suit coat and tie (when you hang out in bars with male poets it's easy to forget this find of apparel exists) but a few of his dark hairs were standing on end.  The put-together-but-a-little-frayed-around-the-edges aesthetic was quite appealing to me.  And he started to talk about Nietzche and he scribbled words on the board that looked both smart and cryptic simultaneously.  I remember he abbreviated Christian as "X-tian" and I remember he handed out color copies of works of art and broke the students into groups and asked them to assess what Nietsche would have thought about the images.  Or maybe Kierkegaard?  The content is a little fuzzy.

I do remember doing what any intelligent, empowered, feminist, MFA candidate woman would do when faced with an attractive man she knows almost nothing about: I leaned over the table, pretending to look at the artwork but really squeezing my boobs together so the sexy man might see what I had to offer beneath my tasteful but low-cut shirt.  Your father claims to have absolutely no recollection of the milkmaid fantasy I was trying hard to suggest.  Instead he remembers that at the break in the class we talked about Holden Village and Lutheran Volunteer Corp. and all the people we knew in common.  He claims that is was our shared interests and values and blah blah blah that intrigued him. 

And there is more to the story, of course.  But that's the beginning of the story of your father and I.

Today there was no decolletage.  There was a nursing sports bra and an Eddie Bauer sweater and a down coat and cargo pants smeared with salt from the road.  There was my thinning hair (thanks, birth!) pulled back in a sloppy ponytail and my glasses and the pale skin of early January.

Your father, however, looked pretty much the same as he did on that day eight years ago.  Only today he was holding you in his arms.


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