TEN YEARS AGO
May 6, 2010 at 12:23 AM
It hasn’t been a year since I came back from Italy..
June 3rd will make a year and certain things have fallen into place..
As soon as I returned I took the exams I needed to become a certified teacher and a driver..
I am now a certified high school teacher but have yet to sit behind the wheel..
Work is fine.. I am always fine when it comes to that department.. work, work and more work..
I even have an offer to return to Milan, nice huh? but I don’t want to go back..
I am ready to start in the classroom. I am ready to take on a room of hopeful and helpless teenagers. I am convinced that my calling is Now..
Not bad when it comes to things that can be controlled..
But then there is the ‘matters of the heart’
I have been on and off a ludicrous string of bad encounters with guys..
One was a teacher, David, close to my age with a little girl, she is twelve and even if it was a nice date, five feet away from Scarlet Johansson on a Broadway stage, he never called back..
We had a pseudo love affair in writing.. we wrote and wrote almost every day before meeting and it turned out to be just that.. words
Couple of emails from another guy, Richard, an Eastern European, works in a logistics company in Long Island.. and just as brief was his entrance into my life, so was his exit..
There was Brandon, young Jewish musician, played the guitar.. the most beautiful grey eyes.. but his age became a factor that broke the deal..
and through this entire roller coaster ride there was a familiar face.. actually two familiar faces.. hey when it rains it pours.. but that didn’t work either.. they didn’t work either..
it is as if the five years I spent abroad never passed by, its as if I’m still 29, the age I was when I left because the guys I kept meeting were younger than me.. and sometimes it wasn’t so bad, but then it was.. for me..
I am the oldest in my family.. for all of the siblings that are the oldest, they know what I mean.. I am the responsible one, the dependable one, the strong one.. and I’m tired.. I don’t want this job anymore..
I want someone to be those things for me.. even if I know I will do ALL of those things and more for them..
So along comes this older guy.. lucky number seven years older than me.. Its like my Heavenly Father has always known what I wanted and He placed him down here to meet me.. and he did..
We met three days ago, and I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge with him and walked it back..
We communicated very little before.. I wanted to write more, feel him out with words but I gathered he was the right to the point kinda guy.. so instead of giving in and give him my number, I invented a riddle for my number.. and he solved it and he called
So the Brooklyn Bridge it was, and there was where we met
He’s six feet tall, Irish-Italian and the oldest of four..
I loved, a little too much, that he’s tall.. I loved that when looking straight ahead I saw his shoulders, and the sun beating down on his neck.. We talked and talked of everything and nothing, the best kind of conversations.. till we arrived to Old Fulton Ave. where he wanted to sit and have pizza at Grimaldi’s.. a little pizza place with a looong line, any other day, it would have been inviting, but the sun was merciless and I really wasn’t looking forward to standing in the sun.. but I did, because he wanted to go there..
We ate and talked some more and moved our conversation to the pier one park, right on the water..
One unforgettable moment was when we were sitting together, I was looking in one direction, while he was looking at a couple with a baby.. I glanced over at the couple a few times but continued to look straight ahead at the Manhattan skyline.. he asks ‘Boy or Girl?’.. I swear my heart skipped a beat and I didn’t know what to answer.. he sensed my hesitation and responded, ‘I mean about the couple over there, you’re probably thinking ‘wow, he’s fast!”.. and I laughed, because yes, it was a question that took me completely off-guard.. I looked at the baby and said, ‘its a girl’..and he says, ‘well how did you know that?’, ‘she has pink socks’..
We commenced our walk back to Manhattan, stopped to get water and talked some more..
He spoke of his brothers and of his job and of his past, briefly
Asked me politely if I wouldn’t mind a ride back home and I accepted..
We walked to the garage on Reade St. and I treated him to Starbucks -‘my brother calls it Fourbucks, cause there is nothing less than four bucks’ he says.. ‘Not true’ I said, there’s the cafe Americano.. listen to me defending an entity that has commercialized one of the last legal drugs on the planet to the point of no return.. I got an iced coffee, he laughed at the fact that I had a Starbucks card.
We get on his Pickup truck and drive smoothly to the Westside highway and we spoke some more..
He spoke of his parents.. they met in college and his father was an English major (I secretly loved that) and he told me how his dad corrected his mother’s love letters, I outwardly loved that, I laughed so hard.. That was amazing.. I imagined these people by the way he spoke of them, and the love in his words made me want to meet them..
He left me a block away from home, because I didn’t want to take him off track on his way home.. He would have to continue North towards Westchester..
We briefly kissed goodbye and our lips were a bit closer this time.. The date was over and I rated it a success.. and a success it was, he called the next night..
I want to see him again and I believe he wants the same..
If it were up to me, I would be on the New Haven line as I type away.. but this time around, I want to do things right..
I want what I have never had, that thing that happens to undeserving women and the women of yester-year, I am liking him..
The hours I passed with him on Sunday seemed like minutes, that now seem like seconds.. and I want to experience that again, with him..
Talk again, talk some more, get to know him and him, me..
it’s all new, this is all new to me.. but this time around I wont ask,
so what now?..
This time around, even this will fall into place
Lessons learned 