Maple Drive: An Audience of Stars

Part 7 of 9. How I fell in love with my wife 33 years ago. The story of the the nurse who married the waiter and the waiter who married the nurse. The happiest two months of my life.

Photo by Federico Beccari on Unsplash

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It felt immediately like a date.

There was a giddy date energy you couldn’t put your finger on, but we’d had a drink first at her apartment then bounded out the front door of her building like young professionals in a Heineken commercial.

If we had known the slightest thing about astronomy – or if we’d been paying attention to KCAL 9 playing in the background only minutes earlier – then we would have looked up into the night sky and noticed all the planets moving into a perfectly straight line for the first time since the advent of the Mayan calendar. But we didn’t, and we hadn’t.

So when Melanie pointed out the night sky over the 10 Freeway and showed me the celestial red heart with the spinning robins flying all around it, I told her it was something from one of the parks down in Anaheim.

*

It was the first time the two of us had been out together alone at night. I’m certain I would have been holding doors and paying attention to subtler needs, some faint echo of the attentive waiter re-emerging. I might have, say, touched her lower back as she was getting in the car, casual, completely offhand, probably while making eye contact and talking intently about something innocuous.

It would have been a let me help you into the car moment, but it also would have been an I just touched you, and that outpost artillery tremor would have been felt up and down the line, an opening gambit along a lively border that night, sending scouts racing through the woods, diplomats and generals being awoken in their bedchambers, aides-de-camp reading out dispatches pouring in from the front, pawns everywhere sliding steadily forward on their green felt bottoms, probing defenses or surrendering themselves in lightning fast early skirmishes.

Oh, we were high, high up there, floating over our world, driving towards the China Club in congested Hollywood traffic. There was a steady stream of easy laughs in the front seat, those quick flashes of happy eye contact that made you forget what you were going to say, odd little silences broken up by fits of smiling and bursts of apologetic interruption.

Every romantic confirmation was a warm, gusting updraft lifting us further up and making it harder to lock eyes without grinning. I drove the car in happy circles, spinning the steering wheel like a-four-year-old on a carnival ride, the little race car driving itself, the wheel spinning on the bolt, parents waving enthusiastically.

Outside the car windows – far, far below us – the other world continued on with its blinking traffic lights and cars and neon signs all crisply detailed and marvelously alive, a world in miniature, seen from a plane window or towering over a train set – everything charming and manageable, with scaled-down frustrations and difficulties. Because everything in our model world wasn’t quite real, it made it easier to forget about problems or simply abandon worries because it turned out they didn’t matter all that much. What mattered was this marvelous sense of unfolding, of unfurling, of something sailing away untethered, this lovely feeling of floating up, then past, then over.

If we’d had the misfortune that night of driving off La Brea and crashing into a miniature telephone pole, we would have gotten out and laughed with hilarious delight because we got to drive into a miniature telephone pole together. What an incredible sound a miniature car makes! Wow that was something! What tiny little person can we tell first?

And, oh my! Come look at the miniature bumper! I bet if we leave it here, a miniature tow truck will come, and we’ll still have time for drinks! Great big gigantic miniature drinks!

High we were.