This story begins with Jack...and the story of Jack begins at birth. Journey back with me...
Boy meets girl. While in diapers. In the same neighborhood where both their parents still live today. Jack and I grew up together, right across the street from each other for our entire childhoods. Our childhood was the kind that we wish our kids could have today; running the block until the streetlights came on, someone's mom always around with Kool-Aid supplies or a quick reprimand for any kid getting out of line, didn't matter who's kid. We made tree forts with secret passwords so only the bigger kids could come in - I still remember making my younger sister, by one year, cry because she didn't know the secret signal one summer. Too bad for her...sissy. Ahh, the joy of being the first-born. We let her come with us most of the time though; entire afternoons spent at the community pool listening to White Snake blaring over the sound system while daring each other to jump off the high dive, impromptu kickball or baseball games in the backyard, Bloody Murder scream-fests after dark which almost always included a moment where my dad would sneak out the front door to hide behind a tree to terrify some already paranoid, terrified child. Life was good.
Then adolescence hit and kiddie friends were no longer cool. Boy got cute and sporty and popular. Girl got awkward and insecure and joined a spelling club. Where she won every time...for the record. We were through with each other. We went to separate high schools where Jack stayed popular and I moved on from spelling club to National Honor Society. We both grew up just a little, we both moved through jobs and dates, we both got married and then both got divorced. Jack had kids, I adopted dogs. We both felt like that was it for us, we had made our choices and now we just had to live with the fallout.
And then my sister got married. The same sister we used to make cry outside of tree forts. Except now we are adults and I don't make her cry anymore. Now my sisters are my very best friends and if she is crying then it is self inflicted, maybe a bad dye job or a lack of chocolate in her immediate vicinity. Anyway...this sister, Lola, gets married and weddings mean fun and dancing and drinking. After her wedding I am way too hopped up to be going home to bed, so I link up with sister Leah and we head down to the local bar district with our wedding dates.
At this point in my life, I am a drinker. Not an alcoholic, but I can go toe to toe with the big boys - something my Busia would be proud of since she is my whiskey drinking partner. Being thirty and having no real responsibilities outside of my immediate person, I have many dinner dates with my girlfriends and bar dates with whoever is asking at the moment. I have book club, which is one of my favorite evenings and where the phrase "are we ever going to talk about the book?" is always uttered and the first thing ordered is always a girly alcoholic drink. And then we do a hand count to see who even read the book. One day we will. So I am ready for any kind of adventure at this point in my life. No one is surprised that I am continuing my party into the early morning hours.
Leah and I start out at the better bar, but after discovering the dance floor has turned into a place to stand and talk, we are ready to move on. Leah and I like to dance when we drink. We are walking out the door, weaving past all the people clogging up the doorway who can't decide if they are coming or going when Leah yells back at me to come see who she found. And out on the sidewalk...is Jack.
I probably would have behaved with a bit more decorum at this point if I had been sober. It is unlikely that I would have yelled "Jack!" and ran over and hugged him like he was some long lost friend that had suddenly resurfaced out of nowhere. But I wasn't sober, so I did and I maintain that had I been sober and been just polite we would not be here today. I would have been too well behaved to proceed to stalk and plot the way that I do next. We owe our whole future to my having the foresight to drink Jack Daniels that night. God works in mysterious-sometimes alcoholic induced- ways.
After hanging on Jack, my party moves forward to find a dance floor and then Leah decides she is taking our drunken dates home for the night. (That totally makes it sound like Leah took two men home with her in a very inappropriate way. And, while funny, I should clarify that our dates were each others' cousins so she was just driving the pair of them home.) I decide to stay with one of my girlfriends that is with us and I immediately maneuver her to going back to the first bar, where I am hoping Jack is still holding down a bar stool. Once at the bar I do a little reconnoitering, I do some dancing while weighing my options, I sit at a little sticky high top and plot. And then I drag my girfriend over and introduce her to Jack's bar friend - who I know and who is way less intimidating than Jack. Game on. He has no chance against the genius of my carefully constructed and drunken plan. I like to say that I was the one who picked him up that night (obviously, look at the amount of plotting I did) but Jack doesn't like that. He always tells me that he didn't do anything he didn't want to do and if he hadn't wanted to end up with me then nothing would have happened. I fail to see how he could have possibly resisted me with the genius of my planning and the hugeness of my ingenuity. We agree to disagree. Moving on. The night goes well, Jack invites me out the following week, and before I know it - I am dating the boy next door. Well...the boy across the street, but you get the picture. Thus begins Jack.
