Dr. Dog's House

You aren’t going to believe what happened to me last week. No way. It’s amazing news.

I’m still a little stunned myself. I haven’t told anybody yet. Not even my wife, whom I usually tell everything to.

Not yet, but I will. You, my friends, will get a world exclusive a few lines from now.

But first …

****
As I started suspecting a few weeks ago, I will indeed be making a long, long trip out of town for Thanksgiving Day. And it won’t be to visit relatives or friends.

For the sixth consecutive year, one of our football teams has made its way all the way to the state championship game. They clinched it with a win at the dome in Marquette on Saturday, Nov. 21. The title game is at Ford Field in downtown Detroit on Friday, with a kickoff at 9 a.m. Central Time. (It’s 10 a.m. down there.)

The team had looked like it would be defeated in the first weeks of the playoffs. But they won against two strong teams and then dominated their regional opponent and, on Saturday, their opponent in the state semifinal game. Next stop: Detroit.

So much for my plans for visiting friends this week and having a quiet Thanksgiving dinner at home (for the first time since 2003). And the funny thing is, 2009 was supposed to be the “regrouping” year for our team, the one when the players acquire varsity experience, take a few lumps, exit the tourney early and get to do some deer hunting. But everyone has matured faster than expected, the team improved markedly during the season. And the 2010 team? It’s really supposed to be something. Who knows how many more Thanksgivings I will spend down there?

I’m going to go down there–I just don’t know how yet. Three options. Last year, for the first time, I was able to ride on the team bus–experience the entire week with the team. They sent two buses down to Detroit. This year, due to budget cuts, they’re just sending one team bus, and odds are 99:1 against me riding along.

Option two is the fan bus, if there is one. Here’s what that would be like: ride in the bus for 10 hours or so, climb out to watch the game (about 2 1/2 hours), then climb back on the bus for the 10-hour drive home. Remember to pack along the Tylenol!

Option three is the way I have gone almost every year: Driving down there myself, in my own car. Coincidence or not, I bought new tires a week or two ago, so that part should be OK. The advantage of that is that I can visit my older son (who visited here last week) and have time to talk with him. If I go there by myself, we can really talk. If my wife and/or son invite themselves along, there is almost never time or privacy for that. So I think you know what I would prefer.

In past years, we have watched the Lions game on TV, then watched a movie, or else the kids played some games. Once or twice, we have all gone across the river into Canada, to spend a few loonies–Canada’s Thanksgiving Day is in October, so Thursday is an ordinary working day there, and all the stores and restaurants will be open. If we do that, though, we to take our passport cards along, and David doesn’t have one.

No matter what happens, I am on the road by 7 a.m. Friday, heading downtown to the Ford Field parking lots. After the game and the press conferences, I start the 10-hour drive home. We have had very mild weather for November–some snow is supposed to move in this week, but the ground is not frozen, the lakes are fairly warm, so everything should melt quickly and roads should be no worse than wet.

Saturday, I try to gather my thoughts together for the article about what happened. It’s a long, difficult time. What I really need to do over these next few days is get some extra rest–It’s going to be a busy week.

****
Back to the main topic: my surprise. It’s about an old girlfriend who has found me. She is delighted that she has. So am I.

She was my girlfriend before N was. And B. And S. And even my wife. And I have never seen her in person.

Our history dates back nearly 45 years, when I was in high school. I was taking German in high school (in suburban Milwaukee), and we were told that if we wanted to, we could write to a penpal in West Germany. I wanted to try it, and that is how I started writing to a girl named Martina. We wrote on this onion-skin paper, trying out our German and English on each other, folded it up booklike, put it in thin envelopes with red and blue diamonds on the edges (to indicate air mail), put extra postage on it and mailed it.

We wrote about … I don’t know. This and that. Whatever teenagers talked about during the mid 1960s. Popular music, of course–the Beatles were big on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the other British groups. I was a Rolling Stones fan even then, and the Beatles were a close second. She liked the Beatles most, and when their “Help!” soundtrack record album came out, I scrounged up enough money to buy a copy and mail it to her. That cost some money. I think my dad cut out a thin piece of plywood to keep it from getting smashed–evidently it worked.

We wrote for about two years. Then … I don’t remember. Either she graduated from her school or I did from mine. Anyway, life intervened, and we stopped writing each other. Kids, you know. They have the attention span of a fruit fly.

But I remembered her, her name, the city where she lived … and when a German woman named Martina contacted me via Facebook last Friday, it awoke those memories of a Martina from long ago. I asked if she is the same Martina L. who lived in R. … and she said she is.

Today she is a “Chefsekretärin bei einem Strafverteidiger” (chief secretary of a defense attorney), is married (second marriage) and has a son and granddaughter. Her Facebook profile says her favorite quotation is “Vergangene Tage, nicht weinen, dass sie vorüber, lächeln, dass sie gewesen.”

Literal translation: “Past days, don’t cry that they are over; smile that they happened.” A pretty good philosophy on life, I think.

All that happened out of the blue. So now I am trying to remember how to speak and write German, what the different words mean, the rules on word order and word endings and umlauts and genders and cases and all that stuff. I haven’t studied German for over 40 years. So among the things I will look for while downstate this week will be … a good German language guide and dictionary.

Wow. Amazing.

I don’t really know what I’ll be doing tonight. It’s “E.R. Night,” so my wife will be occupied. My plans for this weekend are up in the air, too.

But I know exactly what I’ll be doing three months from today.

I will be driving west, across Wisconsin, to Minnesota, heading for the Twin Cities. I will drive to the south side of the metro area to Bloomington, to the Mall 0f America, and leave my car in one of the parking ramps on the east side of the mall. But I’m not going there to shop.

Instead, I will head for the light rail station and get on the train that goes to the terminal at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. I will make my way to the baggage claim area.

At some point, my phone will ring. “Hello, I’m here, Where are you?” “Hello, I’m here. Where are you?” Eventually we will talk ourselves together, and B and I will see each other in person for the first time. Hugs and kisses will ensue, I’m sure.

I got to know B last August when she complimented me about an article I wrote about polyamory–she and her husband are in an open relationship, as are my wife and I. As we got to know each other better, we found that we have a lot in common, and as we continued writing each other, a strong friendship was built. We just connected well, I guess, and our relationship strengthened. Late last fall, we started talking about the chances of us meeting each other face-to-face.

Due to my goofy work schedule, my only real chance to take a long trip is in spring or summer–the fall and winter sports schedules are too intense for me to take time off. Meanwhile, because of her job, B can’t take vacations during June or July–that’s the busy season at her office.

So our chances to meet are limited to spring or else in August. It couldn’t have been during an August weekend, though. From mid July through the end of August, I’ve got to cover events every single weekend–and then the fall sports season starts before Labor Day. That doesn’t leave many options except in the middle of the week. So we were left to wonder … Could we meet in Seattle? Could we meet in Minneapolis? Could we ever meet, period?

The whole situation turned upside down early this year. In 2009, the Fourth of July is on a Saturday. Because of that, B learned in February, the office staff would get July 2 and 3 off. Instantly, as she told me later, she remembered that my neopagan camp in southern Wisconsin takes place during the first few days of July.

She dropped the bombshell in an e-mail at the end of February. To paraphrase, she wrote: Suppose I fly to the Twin Cities on the 2nd, you pick me up there and drive us to the event, we spend the 3rd and 4th there, and you drive me back to the airport for the flight home on the 5th: What would you say to that?

What would I say? I said that sounds like an excellent plan. For the last month or so, we have been discussing this and that related question. About two weeks ago, she booked her flight reservation. Now it’s a matter of waiting for July.

When I told my wife about it, she answered this way: “If you think you are going to do that … then you can drop me off at my sisters’ place along the way.” Her sisters live in Wisconsin, right on the highway leading to the Twin Cities. She wants to spend a few days with them.

So our current plan is that I will take her there on the 1st, we’ll spend the night there, and then I leave for the Twin Cities by myself on the morning of the 2nd … and then, after dropping B off at the airport on the 5th, I’d drive back there, pick her up and then we drive the rest of the way home. Meanwhile, David is going to make two stops at the house to feed the cats.

My car doesn’t have a lot of cargo space, and it will need to carry a lot of extra stuff for the camping–but now we are thinking we will just spend just one night in the tent. That means I won’t have to take so much stuff along. We will take just one sleeping bag and a couple blankets. It will be early July, and I don’t think we would need so much extra warmth at night. And if it doesn’t work out that way, we’ll find a way to stay warm anyway.

Both of us are going through what’s called NRE (new relationship excitement) right now, and the next three months may take forever to get here. But we’re both mature enough to know that eventually the big day will come. We have been talking excitedly about our four days and three nights together–what we’re going to do, what we’re going to see, what the camp will be like. You wouldn’t think we’re both in our 50s (and closer to 60 than 50).

In a few years, B plans to retire from her job, and then they plan to return to the Midwest, where they were both raised. Mind you, they won’t exactly be close, but they’ll be much closer than they are now, and I’ll be able to make an occasional visit. That’s off in the future, of course.

For now, we will enjoy a few days together before returning to the other person we love. It will end with one last ride on the light rail. A quiet walk into the terminal, a last, long hug and probably a few tears. One thing we plan to do is buy each other a little souvenir. Something relatively small, cheap and inconsequential. Something that we can look at later and hold and stroke as the memories come flooding back. Something to remember until our next close encounter of the best kind.