I tell this tale because I love the telling and have lived within its happy ending for over four decades. If you've heard or read this before and choose to not revisit it again then move on and have yourself a merry little Christmas. This is what I called:
My Christmas Story
I first spoke to the woman I was to marry forty-two years ago tonight. I had seen her but hadn't worked up the nerve to speak to her, a few weeks earlier but I already knew I would marry her (to this day, I have no idea how I was so smart. But I was).
I had been in (West) Germany only about two months, arriving shortly before Halloween, which, back in the day, wasn't a holiday of any kind in Germany at all-it was strictly a Yank Prank like Thanksgiving only harder to explain to people who weren't American.
Chris and I had started out drinking and feeling sorry for ourselves, me in the lead on that count (for being stuck in Germany for the holidays), earlier in the day in the Frankfurt am Main party district, Sachsenhausen, where what seemed like millions of people, swarming like flies, made passage from anywhere to anywhere else almost impossible.
Eventually, though I have no recollection how, we came to be more in mid-town, down the street from CBS Germany (though we didn't know that at the time) near Eschenheimer Tor. Because I am relentlessly competitive, I got much drunker much faster than Chris who did a very good job looking out for me since, family tradition, once I get my drunk on I'm never confused with Mr. Congeniality.
Chris and I were seated in a booth with a round bench around the table with room for plenty of other people but they would have to move in as we had decided to remain on the ends. As the evening went on, our table filled up. When the woman who was to be my wife arrived with her girlfriend there was really hardly any room left so when she asked if she could be seated I offered her my lap and she accepted.
As quickly as she sat down I offered, "now that you're sitting on my lap, how about telling me your name?" and so it began, in a moment of suaveness never before (or again) seen on our planet. Cue the swelling music.
Chris and I were seated in a booth with a round bench around the table with room for plenty of other people but they would have to move in as we had decided to remain on the ends. As the evening went on, our table filled up. When the woman who was to be my wife arrived with her girlfriend there was really hardly any room left so when she asked if she could be seated I offered her my lap and she accepted.
As quickly as she sat down I offered, "now that you're sitting on my lap, how about telling me your name?" and so it began, in a moment of suaveness never before (or again) seen on our planet. Cue the swelling music.
In the decades since all of this happened, I've tried to calculate the number of actions and activities that had to take place, just so, so she and I could meet but since I chose to be a liberal arts major making sure I'd avoid using or needing math in my life, I cannot possibly execute the calculations.
I've long since given up trying to make sense of the world as it was or as it is. I will tell you I believe because that's how I was raised and habit is often more lasting than logic, that there is a reason for everything we do and everything we fail to do.
As attractive as I find the 'we're all hostages from Hades/We're all bozos on this bus' approach to questions about divinity, humanity and the universe at large, I can't really leave it there.
If Christmas is a time of love, and this is the night when I found mine, how can I not encourage you to be of good cheer and renew your faith even if you've yet to meet the person who completes you? A more luckless, lunchless, loser than I could you not have imagined, but a miracle was still mine. Keep your eyes wide and your heart open. There's magic in the air if and when you want it.
-bill kenny
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