Here We Are Now

On November 20, 2007, Sara and I met for our first date at a restaurant in Ft Greene called Olea. It's on Lafayette St just a couple blocks from the school she was teaching at that year. It's a simple but thoughtfully put-together place with actual cushions on the chairs and pew seating along the walls. The noise level is somewhat quiet but not in a stifling way, and the lighting is moderate. The food is good and the menu encourages you to order tapas. Basically, it's a perfect place to have a first date. I had never been there before, and--prior to last night--I had never been there since.
In addition to working up street on Adelphi St, Sara also used to live in the vicinity, maybe a 15 minute walk away. That was one job and two moves ago for her, though, and so neither she nor I ever had a reason to be in the area. However, since she both liked the restaurant and is a sentimentalist, she always wanted to return. Last night we finally did.
I am not to be confused with a sentimental person, but it was certainly a nice experience to relive what turned out to be a very important moment in my life. I say "what turned out to be" because it wasn't at all so obvious at the time. I'm going to go ahead and speak for her a little now, but we didn't have anything like the love-at-first-sight experience(1). And then, while we both had a very nice time at the first date, it was far from apparent that we were on the march toward a lifetime together.
I'm fairly certain that her basic motivation for approaching me was to help move on from her previous relationship. Two years later, my motivation is still unknown to me, but whimsy no doubt played a large role.
The point is that there's more than one way to skin a cat, and sometimes the cat still gets skinned even if you aren't trying.
Too often people too strongly use either societal generalities or their own experiences or to explain or understand others. I really enjoyed re-doing our first date last night, not because it reinforced my love for Sara, but because it reminded me how delicate and unpredictable fate can be. There was an impossible sequence of extremely tenuous events that unfolded just perfectly to leave us in the happy place we are today. I met her when I'd just turned 27. Perhaps 60 years of my life then were laid out before me, on the basis of very little. So much of who we are is castles made of sand. No, I'm not being rueful, I'm being impressed. And feeling very fortunate.


1. We didn't first meet at the restaurant, of course. That happened at a bar called Moe's four days prior, but that connection was far less memorable. I mean that literally, since I was quite inebriated. In fact, when she texted me the next day I did not initially remember her at all and only after great effort was I able to recreate what I (fortunately, I can now say) deemed to be her cute face.