How I Met Lefty

Mrs. G asks: How did you and Lefty meet and when did you know he was the one?

This is a story I love to tell. I'm a great believer in the power of stories to connect us to the past and to each other. We tell our family stories over and over.

Lefty and I met at a party, while we were both in graduate school at the University of Maine. It was a party I did not plan on attending. I was coming off a bad (and excruciatingly public) break up and was well into the recovery-no-more-dating-for-me-ever-again phase. No parties, no flirting, never again. But the party was thrown by a dear friend who called me and said she had no coffee filters and lord knows, you can't throw a party for graduate students in Maine, in March, without coffee. So I grabbed a handful and drove over, planning to say hi to a handful of people and return to my evening of listening to Melissa Etheridge and feeling dark.

The first room I walked into was the kitchen and Lefty was standing there, leaning against the counter, drinking cranberry juice out of a large plastic bottle. He was tall with a scruffy beard and had this way of leaning in and listening when you were talking that I immediately found enchanting.

That year, I was working part-time developing photographs and was half way through the story of some rather risqué photos and how flummoxed I'd been when the well endowed gentleman featured in them had come in to pick them up, when I noticed that Lefty had a hole in his jeans. A hole that was near the zipper. A hole through which I was quite certain I could see pubic hair peeking out. I stuttered through the rest of the story and then blushing furiously, I put my hand out to block my vision and said, "I'm sorry, but you have a hole in your pants and I'm finding it a little distracting."

He didn't flinch, or seem embarrassed or even look surprised. He laughed. And then I laughed. And the air crackled for just a second between us and I found it kind of hard to breathe properly.

Lefty and his friend left the party before I did and when I saw he was leaving I did something that I had never (really, I swear, never) done before. I wrote my name and number on a hastily grabbed scrap of paper, pressed it into his hand and said, 'If you don't call me I'm going to be very disappointed."

When I got home, I woke my sister up and told her all about it.

There was definitely something going on from the first time we met. Something about the energy between us that stunned me. I knew that something important was happening. I wasn't sure what it was, but I knew I liked it.