My Blog For You
Tammy and I drove up toward the entrance to Mount Rainier State Park, paid our fare for the day and proceeded to figure out where we wanted to have our picnic lunch. I had put everything together. We had kind of narrowed the entre for our sandwiches over the phone to ham, turkey, chicken with cheese. I had brought all three along with the condiments, breads, French her favorite and multigrain my favorite. We found a place to unload and set up our table. She made the sandwiches. I had brought several kinds of fruit, chips and her favorite again “chocolate specifically Hershey’s chocolate candy bars. With mood in mind, I had earlier in the week before our date bought a boom-box, I made up a CD of light Christian instrumentals for background music. From my storage I brought several warm wool blankets to sit on for each side of the picnic benches of our picnic table along with a plastic tablecloth that was my mother’s, very colorful but plastic so we could pick up any messes when we were done. I had just to be romantic and brought a candle but then I saw the signs for “No Fires” and thought better of it. After all this was a research date…no, an interrogation date…no, two friends meeting to tell our stories. Yes, it was all that. Conversation is always where one of the two parties trying to have a conversation must start. Starting a conversation off with someone you have been dating via an online site is difficult. It is like standing on the high dive at a public pool or plunge. Lots of people are below waiting on you to dive but they must wait for you to jump. You can get locked up their waiting for courage to come on you like a cool breeze. If you wait for that on a hot summer day you might be up there for a while. Such was starting off the conversation I wanted to start with Tammy. I was a bit scared as what I was going to tell her we had never talked about before. I wanted to tell her from the beginning, but I kept thinking, “What if that part is a deal breaker for her or what if when I talk about that will she be polite and get back in her car and never want to talk to me again”. Inside I was boiling over as I knew I needed to say these things to her face to face, not caring if she accepted them but knowing that they were all honest, all the truth, all who I was, what I had done, what I had lived. I knew I needed to say all of it. From what I remember of that day, with that thought in my head I started out something like this, “Tammy, I want to have a conversation with you and you with me, today in this beautiful place. You are a beautiful person who I am growing to care about deeply. I want to tell you about my life and how I got to this place. I want you to hear all the good parts and all the bad parts from my mouth to your ears and my eyes looking into your eyes. I want both the good and the bad to come from me first before you hear it from anyone else. I believe this is a moment and a day that God has given to both of us. I don’t know what the path ahead is for both of us, but I really want you to see me for who I really am”. From there we started sharing our stories about our successes and failures, our up’s, and our downs. We talked about our kids and their kids, our grandchildren. We talked about our ex-wives, our ex-husbands, our jobs, what we wanted in the future and more. We ate our lunch, we drove the loop, we saw the sites of a wonderful and beautiful place talking all the way through the day. At the end of the loop, the sun was starting to set, and we were starting to get hungry again. We had had an absolutely great day being together. Tammy said, “I know a great place to eat for dinner”. We had not planned that part of our date. We drove down from the mountain back to her car at the convenience store near the city of Morton and she got in her car and led me to the place we would have dinner at. The restaurant was called Spiffy’s. We walked in and got a table very soon after as they were mildly busy, and we did not have to wait long. We continued to chat about stuff. I really don’t remember much about it other than the food was OK. Because I was from California originally, I had been to way better places to have a meal at, but it was OK because I was with her. Our relationship was starting to take off, we were laughing and telling on ourselves all sorts of silly, funny, zany things we had done, saw and been a part of. It was like a fairy-tale. I was really having a good time and I did not want it to end. The evening did though. I walked her out to her car not sure if I should shake her hand again, hug her or outright kiss her on the lips. I chose the more conservative end to our date and just gave her a hug and whispered, “I hope we can do this again soon”. She said, “I would like that”. We talked the following day.
More Next Week
