The Night We Met

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When the leaves have deserted the trees and chilly rains set in, I think back. First, it was only a year ago, then two, three, and now four. Four years ago tonight, Charles and I met, and a magical time began for us.

Sometimes we look at each other and say, “Remember when you walked around the corner into Dave’s living room?”

I don’t know if other couples revisit their origin story as often as we do. The events of the heart are ordered differently for different people. Although I doubt it is necessary for a successful relationship, it is fun to do, and we love talking about the time we met.

Our story began at a specific point with specific results and is quite compact. However, I find it difficult to explain all the conditioning that went into that cataclysmic encounter and to stop tracing out all the nuances that led to our relationship. I do believe that the things that prepare us to notice and accept a particular person as a partner start long before the decisive moments where it all gets decided one way or another.

Suffice it to say, that although Charles and I had never met, we both had heard about the other. For several years, I had known of him through mutual friends who said that he was a pilot and that he was planning to go to Guatemala to fly for a mission group.

One year, my friend Dori suggested to me that I should go along to Bancroft with her to visit her sister Vi and help with a fundraiser. So I went, and in the course of the weekend, we stopped in with Vi and her husband Dave for a visit at Glenn Burkholder’s place. This was Charles’s home, but Charles himself was missing.

“Where’s Charles?” someone asked in the course of the conversation.

“Oh, he’s off at Oshkosh for the week,” his dad said. Oshkosh, incidentally, is the largest airshow and congregation of aviation aficionados in the world.

“Oh, that boy,” his mom said. “He’s got flying on his brain.”

After that weekend, Charles’s mother told him that there had been a girl around that she thought he would have liked meeting. She said that I taught English in Bangladesh and worked on an ambulance.

I was not particularly interested in aviation, and Charles was not particularly interested in English teaching and emergency medical work. But both of us thought the other sounded like an adventurer and were intrigued. This is the kind of ironic joke our minds play on us to pair us off and propagate little human beings. As a result of liking the sound of an adventurous person, both of us are now well cemented into a very ordinary life of cooking supper and paying the mortgage. But that’s giving the story away.

Over a year passed, and I returned to Bancroft. This time I came with my friends June and Jan (Jan being another sister of Vi’s) to spend the weekend.

I loved the Bancroft area from the first visit. Ever since I was a little school girl, I have dreamed about living in the north. Perhaps it is a leftover fascination with frontier days and pioneer stories, and the Canadian wilds have always seemed a little closer to that utopia. Now that Bancroft seems like an average, modern place to live, neither very northern nor very wild, I dream about us moving to the Yukon, as missionaries of course.

So I was excited to return. I also thought maybe I could meet that Charles this time.

We were almost to Bancroft, having passed through the last of the disappointing fields and towns that I pretended not to see, and were traveling through long stretches of road appropriately lined with pines and marshes when Jan mentioned that the Burkholders were away for the weekend.

“Strike two,” I thought and stared out at the glum landscape.

Matters brightened when we reached our destination. Dave and Vi were fun to be with, even without interesting, eligible males floating around the periphery. We settled in with blankets and mugs and prepared to talk the weekend away.

Saturday was drippy and cold and ugly all around, in spite of the quintessential Canadian scenery. We went for a drive, and Dave told us stories about these Burkholder boys. (See Aviation Perpetual.)

Late that afternoon, Dave asked if we girls would mind if he invited the Burkholder boys over for the evening since their parents were away. We said that would be fine, we didn’t mind.

And they came.

And Charles walked around the corner into the living room.

And we started talking.

He showed me pictures of his airplanes. I understood planes about as well as Greek. Actually, I may have understood Greek better.

My friends and I talked about Bangladesh and backpacking in India.

Charles’s brothers had also come around the corner with Charles, although that isn’t as important to the story, and they contributed to the evening in their various ways. Ben told stories about his work, and Alex, the youngest, asked questions whenever he wasn’t being squelched by a brother. I had met Ben and Alex the year before, but not Eric. Eric sat on an uncomfortable chair, blinked owlishly from behind his glasses, and said nothing at all. I thought he must be the quiet, scholarly one in the family. After four years, I have reversed that assessment.

Charles drank lots and lots of coke. I supposed at the time that he was nervous; now I know that when Charles is sitting around he will refill his glass as long as there is anything to put in it. I also know that a simple thing like meeting me would not make Charles nervous. He hasn’t a shy or self-conscious bone in his body.

I had drunk lots and lots of coffee that day, and my heart was palpitating badly as the evening progressed. I blamed it on meeting Charles, but maybe it was the coffee.

Dave played music with the volume turned up, and we sat quietly, absorbing the songs. I glanced over at Charles, and he was looking at me, his expression unreadable. To this day, I can’t interpret that particular expression. (Charles, reading this, says it is his “who are you and why are you here” expression.)

They were leaving. Charles stood and refilled his cup with coke one last time. Putting his hand on his hip and rocking back on his heels, he tossed the coke down. To this day, I watch him do that every evening before bed.

As we prepared for bed, June remarked on the nice guys we had met. I shrugged, and we didn’t discuss it anymore.

At the Burkholder place, Alex was saying to Charles (as Alex happily reported to me later), “That Missy was a pretty nice girl, huh?”

And Charles said, “I’ve seen lots of way nicer girls.”

I didn’t sleep at all that night.

It was definitely the coffee.