My Shorts and His Sandals

Those shoes on Oates are just cracking me up! Sadly I no longer have my shorts I'm about to talk about.

Many years ago, about a year before I met Jim I made the mistake of dating a coworker. I was young and fancy free then, thinking my dad with his hyperbole corn porn advice from bayou country was back in the stone ages. He'd always said "Do not get your meat and your bread at the same place" as his reasoning about why dating a coworker was so bad.

Turns out he was right. It was the first, last and only time I did it. But the story isn't about the bad date, or even my very first exposure to fundamentalist Christianity. Even if it was both.

I worked at a big restaurant that was a chain in the South in the early 80s while I was in college. I had taken enough coursework to qualify for a culinary certificate just so I could have a decent flexible income to put myself through school after my short lived marriage right out of high school. It was a good job, I could work my schedule around my classes. After a year I got college financial aid from the company, I had decent health insurance, life insurance and other benefits including training bonuses and profit sharing. Even if I had not finished my degree and chosen to stay there it would have afforded me a decent living. Not wealthy, but enough to live and be okay as a single mom.

During the course of my first year I got to know the rest of the crew working in the kitchen, the 4 people in prep, the fry cooks, the line cooks, the bakers, and the cold section where I worked with three other ladies. I loved the work. There was something creative and deeply satisfying about feeding the groups of people from the local hospital, a local ministry and the busloads of tourists on their way somewhere better. I worked there six years total, and still have money in their retirement system.

At the end of shift, either night shift rolling out around 9 pm, or day shift that knocked off around 3 pm there were friends. We all tended to congregate behind the massive building and talk. Some had beer or malt liquor. A few laughs, a few sips of beer.

Gradually I got to know one of the bakers really well. He was about my own age, had a bad leg from a car accident he was having to slowly have reconstructive surgery on. Dark thick wavy hair, bright blue eyes and the smoothest most porcelain white skin I've ever seen. Nice, smart as a whip. A little weird in a nerdy sort of way, but me likee.

Enough group hanging out and he asked me for a date. I said yes. We went to the movies, we went roller skating, we went out to play mini golf, we went to a few concerts. Nothing serious just having a good time. Francis was his name. So when Francis called me about a month into dating inviting me to come over to swim in the apartment pool and grill burgers I thought nothing of it, grabbed my beach towel and my painfully modest bikini and headed out to his place.

Once I got there we never made it to grilling burgers or swimming. We ended up sitting on the couch kissing. kissing a lot. No grabbing or touching of naughty parts, no sex, just that delicious moment when you cannot stop kissing. Until something just ruined it.. there just is no polite way to put what happened except to say he reached orgasm during our kissing.

......AND immediately blamed me. Me? Just merely kissing me. The conversation devolved, he told me the shorts I was wearing made my butt and hips 'look vulgar' (olive green knee length military looking shorts?) and other insults over my appearance. He then started sounding off about his 'slut' sister, the fact that I was wearing a tank top in he 95 degree Louisiana heat like the slutty temptress I was back then.

Francis ended our semi date by pulling out his Bible and spouting some scriptures to end things. I tiptoed away leaving him reading his Bible very loudly aloud, confused about the entire encounter, but also knowing I was appropriately dressed for a swim date, that my butt was not too big or vulgar, and that there was nothing wrong with my sleeveless arms in my tank top. As I was driving away I realized I'd never even bothered to remark upon the fact that on his one unoperated on foot he was wearing something very similar to old John Oates in the photo above, but it gave me a shaky laugh as I went home.

Later I found out he was not long out of living with his parents, his extremely fundamentalist Assemblies of God loving parents, and he still  had a foot in that camp.

At that time I didn't know much of anything about any other religions that were not Catholic or Episcopalian. I wish I had, I wish I would have known how to reach him because I would have told him what happened was no big deal really. It happens. So what?  But I never got the chance. We studiously ignored each other, he called me a slut to every other guy up there, and eventually he left three months later for a job in New Orleans.

I woke up this morning thinking about my dating Francis and how it had gone haywire. It's hard to know what triggers others, and if you don't know how on earth can you get expected to respond the right way? I think about this a lot, in times like now when I am being constantly being bombarded by requests for help, requests for attention and a million other things when feeling about as stressed out as I did running from Francis' sudden Bible verse spewing out of the blue.

Tomorrow we're going to the beach in Samara and shopping in Nicoya for a day away, and on Monday to Arenal to soak in the volcano waters. Something has to give, so when I come back I'll be reshuffling the deck again.

Last night I took the step of shutting off everything, all social media and emails and I worked on my book. I got six pages written and edited. Meeting Stephen King's daily total. Pure peace, quiet and the freedom I needed to create. It was divine! Gonna be more of that, and a lot less on social media. I'd already been trying to cut back in emails and the like since January. Now I must take the next step.

Laughed the first time I saw this video on Saturday Night Live because the blame and the excuses the guys were making had echos from that confusing date. So glad I'm married and I no longer have to date.