March 20, 1985. I had been lurking in a chat room on a local BBS for three days. I hadn’t planned to post at all, but the people there were so intriguing. So I typed in:
Zoe: “Why do you all look so disembodied?”
And the response was quick:
Fuzzy: “We’re not. We’re over here!”
For two months we talked only on BBSs and in email. Fuzzy saved most of those messages, but we’ve never gotten all the way through them again. Too frightening. (Middle ground. Light. Shadow, etc.)
He had been a widower for nine months. His wife of 21 years had died from a sudden illness. Only his youngest of three children remained at home at age sixteen.
Fuzzy had isolated himself from the world sincer her death except for work. But his son had encouraged him to log on to a BBS about the same time that I did.
The man was wound tight. Sad. Funny. Bitter.
I have a relentless crusader complex that wants to nurture the wounded and Fuzzy was no exception. I wanted to be a bridge for him. That’s how I saw myself. If he got used to talking with me and opening up, then maybe he would feel comfortable around women again and ask them out.
But we soon found that we were building bridges for each other. Our interests overlapped enough that he was able to expand my interests in jazz, for example. He could appreciate my interests in Mancini and Jobim, feed it, and open up other avenues.
We found that we had both loved and lost our copies of the book Thank You for the Giant Sea Tortoise. He knew the lyrics to the introduction to the song Laura.
He wrote haiku and played the guitar. I liked storms and wrote awful, sweet, sad poetry on rainy days and played the Romantics or Cole Porter on the piano.
We even had our first argument in email which resulted in my calling him during a thunderstorm to finish telling him off because I had to shut the computer down. That was the first time we talked. The anger vanished after an initial huff and puff. We talked for two hours.
We spent the next two months talking on the phone. One call lasted thirteen hours. We went to sleep talking.
I agreed to meet him in another year.
That plan lasted for a couple of months. He sent me a picture. He looked like Jo’s Professor Baher in Little Women just as I had imagined him when I was fifteen. I liked that. I mailed him photos and one night we decided on the spur of the moment to meet. In real life he looks more like a young Shelby Foote and is often mistaken for him.
That was June 3, 1985. We already knew we were in love. Obsessed really. We were lucky that we were able to work past the obsession and find the part that we call “old shoes” – the comfortable, lived in part. But he still can take my breath away.
We were married January 1, 1986 at the end of a covered fishing pier over a frozen lake surrounded by woods.
In November, he read three novels aloud to me – The DiVinci Code, My Life As a Geisha and The Five People You Meet In Heaven. He was an actor and in radio and his voice is magnificent.
There have been some strange coincidences along the way. (Cue Serling)
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In 1967, I walked into the small store where Fuzzy worked and almost bought some stereo speakers from the strikingly handsome man who worked there. Handsome enough to remember.
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In 1969, I moved into an apartment in a house. My apartment overlooked his backyard. He lived a short block down and one house up from me. He walked past my front steps most afternoons.
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In 1972, I first became friends with “Barbara.” She was one of the bridesmaids in his wedding. I may have even met Fuzzy’s wife at a birthday party for “Barbara.”
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In 1977, I was married and living in an apartment building. A man and his wife moved in next door on a very cold night. My husband and I took them over some hot spiced tea. I don’t remember the man who met us at the door, but he said that it was his brother that was moving in and he took me and introduced me. That new neighbor is my brother-in-law. The man who met me at the door was Fuzzy.
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In 1978, I first became friends with the woman who was with Fuzzy’s first wife when Fuzzy met her while working on a stage production in 1960.
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In 1985, I found a copy of a local Commodore user’s group magazine in my apartment that had a sketch of Fuzzy on the cover.
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I’ll go back to pick up one. In the late 1920’s or very early 1930’s, my future mother-in-law attended a lecture given by my cousin who was a writer.
After almost 19 years, do we love each other? I almost left Paris two days early just to get back to him. And he followed my plane on the internet from the time it left Paris until it got to West Virginia. Then he headed for the airport.
And as of Thanksgiving Day, we have found out that at the age of 61, I am about to become a mother. My much loved step-daughter, the mother of three of my grandchildren, has consented to become legally my own daughter. It is the thrill of my life and I’ve been dying to tell all of you, but didn’t know how.
Yes, I left out the part about getting a divorce from my first husband. But that would have broken the mood entirely. Besides, I knew he loved someone else and they married a few months after we did. The four of us got together on what would have been our 25th Anniversary and went out to dinner.
