Maple Drive: Santorini

Part 4 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 Philip Jahn on Unsplash

⬅️ Chapter 3

They weren’t actresses.

They were nurses, and they worked at Cedars-Sinai. On my recommendation, the pretty blonde with the blue eyes ordered sea scallops wrapped in bacon. They asked if Dudley Moore would be playing. I checked on them more than I needed to, gradually learning their story in waiter-stop mini-episodes, but making sure I stayed in waiter character, making sure the birthday girl had a desert with a subtle candle and the full experience of the place. If you are wondering if I sang, then I’ve lost you completely.

Towards the end of the meal they mentioned that they had arrived by taxi, and I told them that if the two of them would wait for my shift to end I would take them home myself. If they wanted, I would drive them around and show them Hollywood.

In those days I was practiced about being casual about that kind of thing, but it must have made my pulse race beneath my pressed white shirt and black waiter’s jacket to be asking out a customer. A pair of customers. Was that better? Worse?

I worried about this and fussed with their check and scraped their breadcrumbs with my bronze half-pipe crumb scraper. Then with me out of earshot, they must have held a private conference about their dwindling supply of taxi vouchers and laughed, excited about the chances their waiter might try to kill them like in the movies.