I was thirty-six years old the first time I saw my father smile.

The visual hit me so hard I was stunned; I was seeing my father happy. It wasn’t just that he was happy, I was shocked because of the realization I had never seen him that way before. From childhood through my adult years, I had adapted to the idea my father was at his best stoic, or at his worst, morose. Given the tumultuous relationship he had with my mother and the eleven years spent alone after their divorce, to see him interacting while smiling with his new girlfriend, or any woman for that matter, was unheard of.

With a quiet clarity, I understood that in my youth, my dad never looked at me with eyes of indifference, he watched me with a mix fear and caution. As he had been raised in an environment of physical abuse and contempt, he knew he wanted to succeed where his parents had “failed,” so to speak. My dad didn’t want to damage me, as he felt he had been damaged, but didn’t know how to be a father himself. He never learned about the process of parenting through familial absorption, and I had come along much too quickly for him to mentally prepare for the challenge of fatherhood. Instead of raising me hands on, my dad backed off and let me figure everything out on my own, stepping in when he thought necessary.

* * *

Living in Los Angeles kept me fairly unhappy.

At the time, I was pointing fingers and decrying a system I felt kept me down. Looking back, I understand the only thing holding me back, was me; I wasn’t ready to play the Hollywood game. I harbored a simple Midwest naiveté that believed that if you stood on stage and showed a modicum of talent, you’d be recognized; I never once considered any social aspect to the business.

Everything in Hollywood operates on the idea of “heat.” To manufacture heat you have to network, and from almost everything I discovered, networking involved a lot of late night drinking. I’ve always enjoyed being social, but when it comes to the constant wear and tear of hanging out until all hours in the morning just to maintain the “right connections,” I am an absolute failure. Without those connections, nothing happens in Los Angeles.

“Heat” is something that builds around you; it is nothing you can force. For example, were I to approach an agent, look him directly in the eye and say full of confidence, “Hi, I’m Nathan Timmel, and if you sign me on I will get the job done,” the agent would walk away, annoyed at having been disturbed. I was witness to several incidences like this and have given it a shot or two on my own, always with the same result. If that same agent, however, were to sit down at Starbucks and hear two strangers converse, one saying, “I saw this comic, Nathan Timmel, last night. He was pretty funny,” that agent would be all over his phone, screaming at assistants: “Who is this Nathan Timmel I’m hearing about?! Why don’t we have Nathan Timmel on our roster?? Nathan Timmel is the future!” Again, I have observed such interactions.

To keep my ego from being annihilated through rejection, I spent half the year working outside California. I would fly to Madison, Wisconsin, where my mother still lived, and use it as a staging point for comedy clubs scattered across the Midwest. One slow Saturday night on a sojourn through Iowa, only twelve people made comedy their entertainment choice of the evening. Being that Iowa and Wisconsin are neighbors, the instant I finished my set, I walked off the stage and out the door, pausing only to get paid. There was another comic on after me, and I figured it would be better to get a jump on the drive home over hanging out and mingling with the non-crowd of customers. That decision could have been disastrous, if not for the tenacity of one woman in the audience. On that particular Saturday in June an Iowan named Lydia Fine decided she needed to get out of the house and have a laugh. Though I had no way of knowing it at the time, when I left the club before the technical end of the show, she was watching from the audience, and was angered by my disinterest in socializing.

Several days later, I received a MySpace Friend Request. MySpace, for those that don’t know, was a social networking site that was “cool” after Friendster became “lame,” and was “lame” after Facebook became “cool.” Thought as a comedian I probably should have been collecting as many online “friends” as possible, I never blindly accepted requests. I found that too many people out there have their own agenda, and nine-point-nine times out of ten I am entirely uninterested in their marketing attempts. The friend request I received from Iowa, however, had two things going for it: the hometown listed on the woman’s profile was twenty minutes from where I had performed, and the woman herself, the aforementioned Lydia Fine, was stunningly attractive. Or, at least she was on line; I had already discovered that many people altered pictures for publication on the Internet, that they appear much more thin/attractive/desirable than they actually were in person. I fired off a quick note to Lydia, “Nice to meet you. Are you friending me because you were at a show this past weekend?” and that was that.

Until, that is, I received a reply in my mailbox. She had indeed been at a show, and enjoyed what she saw. I responded to her reply, and back and forth we started to sway, each exchange growing in length just a little. One evening I opened up a note to find ten digits awaiting me. Lydia had been to a concert, imbibed her brain with alcohol, and mustered up the courage to ask me to call her. Not wanting to disappoint a (supposedly) beautiful woman, I dialed her up. I didn’t hold on to the number for five days to “play cool,” or pretend I hadn’t received the email until the next day so I wouldn’t seem over eager; I wanted to call, so I did.

Over the course of five hours, we had the most bizarre, no-holds-barred conversation I’d ever had in my life. This wasn’t “So, what kind of movies do you like?” giggling, it was everything-on-the-table honesty. I had never in my life had a first conversation like it. Hell, sometimes I had been in mini-relationships of a few months to a year that never approached the depth to which Lydia was willing to descend. But the thing is, I loved it. She wasn’t trying to impress me, put on airs, or falsify who she was; neither was she laying out her cards in a brash, “take it or leave it” manner. I got the sense she was simply saying, “This is who I am; I am looking for someone to accept me as is.”∗ We finally said our goodnights somewhere in the neighborhood of four in the morning, and as I sat back in my hotel bed to take it all in I wondered, “Who the hell is this woman?”

Lydia was a person whose life was in unfortunate flux; she had recently: started a new job (one which left her in tears on the first day and proceeded to remain unsatisfying for several months), lost her “second-mother” aunt to ovarian cancer, was witness to her eighty-three year old grandfather undergoing surgery for an abdominal aneurysm, broke up with her boyfriend (an event that resulted in him shouting insults at her over the phone for the better part of an hour), started seeing a therapist, gone on depression medications and lost her entire network of after-hours social friends. The last statement is the most important, in terms of how she happened to arrive at the comedy club to see me.

Girls can be exceptionally cruel. In adolescence, they create social cliques that are impossible to breach and are generally lorded over by a single queen. Sometimes, if women do not graduate from the mentality they learned in Junior and Senior High, they will carry this thought process with them into adulthood. In Lydia’s case, she was a small cog in a gear that revolved around recreational volleyball; the controlling force of this social circle was a tiny woman who had a severe Napoleon Complex named Mindy. One frustrated day, Lydia butted heads with Mindy, and as if girls of fourteen and not young women, Mindy put the word out to the group: it’s Lydia or me, choose. Everyone but one friend chose Mindy. Lydia found herself isolated, and entirely alone every weekend.

Several weeks after her banishment from the “in crowd,” word reached Lydia that Mindy was having a gathering. Depression sank in. Everyone Lydia used to hang out with would be there, laughing and having fun, while she would be alone in her condo. Desperately needing to get out of the house and away from that situation, Lydia called Kristine, the one friend who had refused to choose sides in the immature display of behavior by Mindy. Kristine agreed to forgo the party and attend a comedy show with Lydia. So it came to pass, a series of unfortunate events brought Lydia to the comedy club, on the very week out of the year I happened to be in town.

After getting to know one another on line, Lydia and I chose to meet in person; we each wanted to see whether or not the spark we shared via the telephone would translate into in-person chemistry. I was constantly on tour in the Midwest, and was easily able to drive to her tiny town for our date. As I parked out front of her condo, I called to let her know I had arrived. Lydia made her way down three flights of stairs, and as she did so windows lining the front of her building allowed me quick glimpses of this woman I’d agreed to take to dinner. When she finally got to ground level and opened the front door, I thought, “Oh wow. This could be very good.” Lydia was, simply put, stunningly beautiful. Sandy-blonde hair rested gently below her shoulders, she was taller than many Hollywood leading men I had bumped into and she wore a wide, nervous smile. I was smitten almost immediately.

We retreated to her condo, where her new kitten Simon, a gender-confused little fluff of gray, ran in between my ankles as I walked in. During my entire visit, he howled for attention as if the most neglected kitty on the planet. In contrast, Lydia’s full-grown cat, Pandora, was an aloof and skittish creature with brown and black hair speckled with dandruff; she darted into hiding immediately upon my arrival.

While being given the grand tour of her three-bedroom condo, the bookshelf gave me pause. Though littered with much in the way of fiction and business management, the top row contained many offerings on romance and self-reliance. The titles were standard fare, and may as well have screamed, “So You Just Got Dumped,” “Why Your Friends All Left You,” “I’m Isolated and Cry Myself to Sleep,” and “You’re Going to Die Alone.” My brow furrowed slightly, but I wondered if these tomes were helping Lydia be as honest as she was with me. Instead of playing games, the death-knell of any union, she was communicating, openly and honestly. I liked this.

While we talked, Lydia couldn’t stop fidgeting; her nails were nonexistent and looked like they were attacked to the nub regularly. I did my best to put her at ease, but we quickly retreated to a bar so she could get a drink or two in her and relax.

Dinner took place at one of her favorite restaurants; she had the “gourmet” Mac & Cheese, which I thought was simply an excuse to charge $15 for a seventy-nine cent item, and I had a salad that left me less than thrilled. We conversed easily, but after our meal is where everything got interesting.

To explain what happened next, I must offer up some background on who I am as a person: when around most animals, especially little woodland creatures, I lose control of most of my mental functions, which are questionable at best to begin with. I cannot fully explain why I find these mammals so endearing, and it is best to give an example of my mental retardation rather than to try to explain it any further: though I am not proud the action, I once tried to pet a bear. A wild, bear. I was camping, and warned that the local black bears were used to humans and wandered into camp frequently. The Park Ranger told everyone sternly that should we come into contact with one, they were still wild animals and we should make loud noises to scare them off; under no circumstances was anyone to approach them. Naturally, one did come scrounging near my camp for scraps, and he was an adorable little Black Bear. Not a cub, which, given the protective nature of mother bears would have spelled immediate disaster, but a standard-size fluff-ball Black Bear. While most people in the camping area were curious, yet cautious, my first thought was to grab food and attempt to draw him close to me. Now, I say this in full awareness of what I was doing. Did I think the bear was tame, or would let me pet him? No. My mind was at war with itself; I was very calm, but had two internal voices speaking to me. On the one hand, my inner child was saying, “OMG, IT’S A BEAR! LOOK AT ITS LITTLE NUB-TAIL! I WANT TO GRAB HIS EARS AND GIVE HIS HEAD A BIG SCRUFF-SHAKE! WHO’S A BEAR? WHO’S A LITTLE BEAR WITH A LITTLE BEAR BLACK NOSE?” My quieter, more rational and therefore weaker responsible adult voice was calmly relaying the message: “You are a fucking moron. This thing will get near you, get startled, and rip your throat out. It’s a fucking bear, dipshit.” Fortunately for my well being, the bear, though somewhat interested in the idiot making kissy noises at him, eventually wandered off, leaving me to see another day. So, the point of the story is: if I lose my shit and attempt to hug bears, you can only imagine how I am when faced with non-threatening creatures. With that, I return to my first date with Lydia.

As it was a lovely spring day, we decided to take a sunset walk along the Iowa River and burn off a few of the calories we had just ingested. Many other couples were doing the like, and all the little animals living on the banks had crawled out from their homes. We watched squirrels skipping across the path in front of us, and everything was going swimmingly when Lydia nudged me.

“Look at the rabbits!” she whispered, pointing at a large green shrub with three bunnies happily munching clover underneath it.

I could describe what I did, but think an outsider’s perspective would serve best at this point and here turn things over to Lydia:

“Nathan stopped walking, and I turned to see what happened. I was mortified to find he’d dropped my hand and was running toward the rabbit bush, although I’m not sure I would call what he was doing “running,” per se. It was more of a gallop or a scamper, really, but with his arms thrown up loopily over his head. He was shouting, too. “BUNNIES! BUNNIES! LOOK AT THE BUNNIES!”

I stood there dumbfounded, stunned, and profoundly embarrassed. What the hell was he doing? People were looking at us.

“Nathan!” I hissed. “Stop! Get back here!”

He didn’t listen. The bunnies had started bounding away from him and he was giving chase, doing his best to zig as they zagged, and hustle as they bustled. I figured my only hope for saving my reputation was to pull the same trick my mother used to when I’d embarrassed her. She’d simply walk away and pretend she didn’t know me, so I did just that. A few seconds later I could hear him running up behind me, and felt him reach for my hand again. I was calming down a little, and underneath my still-fresh embarrassment, I was hiding a smile. A grown man who chased bunnies? Who was this guy?”

Like with the Black Bear, though an internal logic might tell me it would be best to simply let the bunnies be, quietly enjoying their floppy ears and ever-wiggling noses from afar, it’s all to much for me to process at times and I simply explode in excitement. Though I know it will never happen, I like to pretend that someday I might catch a bunny, and we will frisk through the meadow together, and be friends, and I will hug him and pet him and name him George. Yes, this from a man who tested so well in school he was advanced several grades several times. If that isn’t an indictment of our school system, I don’t know what is.

Thankfully, Lydia was quite forgiving of my idiot’s excursion, and our first date ended up extending from dusk into dawn. Eventually, she rose to leave (very late) for work, and I went my merry way back on the road. As our first date had gone well, it was decided we would have a second, and possibly even a third. I was still touring, so Lydia made plans to spend a getaway weekend with me while I performed in a small, Illinois town. If we were keeping in line with our “hold no secrets” approach to getting to know one another, this was a bold step. After telling her mother she had met someone, “a comedian,” the response had been a cool, “That’s nice, but what does he do for work?” The idea someone could make a living as a comedian hadn’t really crossed Lydia’s mind, but if she was wondering what kind of provider I would be, an eye-opening insight into the world of entertainment was about to take place.

Our weekend trip had me working a club I’d been to many times before, each time as the middle comedian of the show. I always did well there, and my ego told me it was my turn to move up, but I sadly had no fame to my name and wasn’t going to be allowed the top slot. That weekend, the headliner, on a name recognition scale of 0-10, was only a one, and that’s on a good day. As I was a zero, that made him more marketable than me. Unfortunately, he had better management than skills and had been performing for fewer years than I had. In an embarrassing move for the club, I got bigger laughs and more positive audience responses than he did. Every night, while I was on stage, he sat at the bar getting drunk. By the time he grabbed the microphone the man was a slurring, incoherent mess; instead of performing focused bits of comedy, he would meander off down verbal tangents. It was immediately proven he didn’t have enough material to fill his contracted time, because around the thirty minute mark of his set the club would play several tracks off his CD of phone pranks over the house PA system. I thought I had seen unprofessionalism in my time, but was still stunned by the spectacle of it all. I was actually watching people who had turned over their hard earned money to see comedy, watch a man sit on stage, drunk, while his CD played over the sound system.

Lydia was somewhat aghast. She lived and worked in the corporate world, where if you worked hard and built your resume, you were rewarded. Not so, in comedy, where personality and press trump ability almost every time; whether or not you are funny is always less important than whether or not you’ve been on TV.

It doesn’t mean anything to the narrative at hand, but I have yet to be re-booked at the club despite repeated attempts to play there, while I’ve seen the other comic’s name on the calendar several times. Good times.

* * *

Lydia and I dated long distance for the better part of a year. My schedule allowed us to never be separated for more than several weeks at a time, and Lydia was able to make her way to the West Coast a couple times. Cell phones, instant messaging and video chat kept us sane, but as we grew to enjoy one another’s company more and more it was well understood carrying on a long distance relationship wouldn’t work long term. Something had to give.
Being that I was already tired of Los Angeles, and Lydia had a job she (now) liked, was an Iowa girl at heart and uninterested in the grimy cement jungle of Hollywood, it was ultimately decided I would uproot myself and live among the cornfields of the Midwest. I’d like to pretend there was struggle involved in the decision making process, that I wondered whether leaving Hollywood to pursue an artistic dream was wise in the slightest, but I didn’t. I was really more interested in being personally happy than professionally successful, which, like my inability to play the social game in Los Angeles, probably helped stymie my growth there. Overall, I believed Iowa offered much greater opportunities to me.

I wasn’t moving to simply be closer to Lydia; we decided to go all out right away and move in together. I had never lived with a girlfriend before, and Lydia had never lived with a boyfriend, so the arrangement was going to be interesting, but hopefully not too trying. Unfortunately, one of the first situations I encountered was an examination of my own mortality. Growing old is something we rarely imagine happening while in our childhood or teenage years. As kids, we run around wildly, flail our arms like idiots, pick our nose and see adults as boring creatures that have no fun. By eighteen, we are invincible, standing on the hoods of cars tearing down the highway and drinking to blackout status at concerts, passing out in the port-a-potty, pants around our ankles for the duration of the show, waking only at the end of it as huge cannons blast the finale to "For Those About to Rock--*BOOM*--We Salute You," and adults are our enemy.∗

But at some point in our mid-to-late twenties, we start slowing down, looking around and realizing that our best years are probably behind us and that we might want to do something with our lives. If this revelation doesn't strike, it's even more depressing. Anyone above twenty-five still hanging out in a college bar, dressing like they did while in school, is sad in one of two ways: they're either pathetically wearing clothes like the kids of the day and failing miserably, or, possibly worse, still wearing their old outfits, five years out of style and a billion brain cells away from reality.

Being stuck in one phase of your life isn't limited to bars and acting how you did at twenty; you can get stuck in any age. For over fifteen years, my dad wore the same clothes repeatedly. It was as if he had gone shopping one day in his mid-thirties and bought everything he thought he would need for the rest of his existence. Dad would usually be wearing some awkward combination of a ten-year old, K-Mart-style shirt tucked into Sears-brand not-quite-dress, not-quite-casual pants of the same age. This ensemble was worn without a belt, naturally. My father’s lack of style was so humiliating my sister tried to pick his outfits before being seen in public with him.

After my parents divorced, I helped my dad move twice. Once the second time was completed, I vowed never to do so again unless he gave his overflowing closet of clothes and other mounds of junk—dad was a bit of a hoarder—to Goodwill. Thinking about it now, most of what he owned would most likely be rejected by the charitable institution due to age, wear and style anyway. I mean, sometimes beggars can be choosers.

In wardrobe, my dad was stuck somewhere in the late 1970's. Back then, large hair and mustaches were considered a good idea, which lets you know just how wrong that decade was; neither is ever a good idea. Seriously, show me one picture of a pedophile where the man doesn't have a mustache.∗ The point is, dad was considered an embarrassment. So it was to my chagrin that as my life took a turn for the better—in relocating to Iowa and in with Lydia—I found I had been living my own life of blissful incomprehension.

My awakening started simply enough, by packing my entire apartment into one car, and then finding out I was to fit that entire car's contents into approximately 37% of one closet. Not one whole closet, which is what I had been led to understand I’d be receiving, but a fraction of a closet; the remaining 63% was filled with Lydia’s belongings. Little did I know, the female definition of "Emptying a closet" is "Creating just enough space for you to keep a few trinkets, while allowing me to hold on to clothes I no longer fit into but just might once again someday in the future when I start going to the gym."

Luckily, as I unpacked all my belongings, Lydia was right there to help me organize. By "organize," I mean: Give every item of clothing the once over, making either a “someone-just-farted” face, or nonchalantly allowing me to continue to own it. For now.

Our exchanges during this sorting involved pouting, by me, and steadfast, schoolmarm discipline, by Lyds.

"But, I like that shirt," I'd protest.

"Honey," the gentle scolding would begin, "not only is it old and out of style, it's worn and stretched out."

"It's urban outfitters," I'd whine.

"Yes, and they update their clothes several times a year, not several times a century."

Then I would forlornly drop it into the charity pile. This process was repeated until a large hefty bag of clothes I'd just carted all the way across the goddamn country was sitting by the front door.

Fortunately, unlike my dad, while I did lament my lost treasures—and not everything went, I still have some "fine, you can keep that if you promise not to wear it in public" gems I refused to let go of—I have to admit a guilty pleasure at having someone provide a clue for me when it comes to dressing. After the purge came the binge, meaning we did a little "Welcome to the Modern Age" shopping. Though it started with me shooting down nearly everything in existence, such as Polo Shirts, whose collars I promised to wear popped up if forced to buy, eventually we found stylishly "fun" (her word) articles of clothing at a reasonable price.
Lyds was happy, and I was happy. She now had someone on her arm that looks normal until his mouth opened, and I knew I didn’t have to go shopping for at least five years. Heh.

* * *

If moving in with someone that I’d known for less than a year and only dated long-distance sounded like a recipe for disaster, I’d agree. But somehow, Lydia and I gelled. There were a few minor bumps in the road, but nothing that ever seemed overly disastrous.

One difference in our personalities was discovered via the casual nature two people have to have when sharing close quarters. I don't really think of myself as a prude person, nor am I a germophobe. That said, when it comes to stepping out the shower and drying my body, I stop at the crack at the bottom of my back and reach for toilet paper. This tp is for a quick, final dab at my delicate, between-the-cheeks pucker. This action makes Lydia laugh, as she says, "You know it's fresh-clean from the shower you just took, right?" Such things do not matter to me, as maybe it's a psychological quirk, but I still don't appreciate the idea of sticking a toweled finger up in there, then using that same cottony-spot to dry my face the next day.
On the subject of towels: I sometimes wonder if Lydia and I should take two of them to bed for our little liaisons. It would make more sense to clean up afterwards using a towel apiece; our current ritual involves duck-waddling to the bathroom, attached by a single piece of cloth and delicately trying to avoid spilling sputnik on the carpet. Our kitties, from what I’ve been able to tell, find this event quite confusing. Not the sex part, which they seem to watch with a casual disinterest, the look "Can I get fed soon?” across their faces, but the towel-attached shuffle afterwards; that they stare at with uncomprehending eyes. Lydia and I are aware we look quite silly, yet continue the act after each and every, well, act.

For the record, the kitties have their own interesting set of ceremonies that I don't entirely understand. Every morning, Lydia showers before work, and, and especially so in winter, every morning the kitties join her in the bathroom. They jump up onto the counter and enjoy a little steam-sauna to start the day. Upon completion of her cleaning, Lydia opens the curtain to see both staring at her naked body, each relaxed and hydrated. Meanwhile, neither joins me whenever I get around to showering. They could get the same little burst of moisture they seem to enjoy in the morning, but opt not to. Simon, however, always, always, always seems to come running when it's time for me to enjoy a relaxing constitutional. As I rest on the throne, I find a gray kitty rushing in to sit at my feet, stare up at me, and meow until I pet him. When I stand and flush, he then props his front two paws up on the toilet to peer down at the swirling water, his kitty curiosity asking, "Hey, what's going on in here?"

Another adjustment to communal living was in the department of sleeping arrangements. When living quarters combine, you go from having a nice, wide bed for your single whole self, to a space you have to share. Lydia likes to sprawl out, meaning I immediately became an invasive burden to her slumber. I often wake to find body parts littering my person.

At bedtime, I generally fall asleep while she reads whatever it is she's currently using to expand her mind: a book, Time or Fitness, Harlequin Romance Novels... What’s odd is, before co-habitation, I usually had to be completely exhausted in order to sleep. If I wasn’t, I’d just lay wherever I was, thoughts bouncing around my noggin. But something about laying in bed with Lyds makes me relaxed enough to drift off when I’m only nominally tired. I like that. A few months into our co-habitation, she asked, "Do you feel me rest my hand on you when I finally turn out the light?"

Surprised, I responded that I did not.

Lydia informed me that when she sets aside her book and settles in for bed, her first sleep position involved touching me in some way; a rested hand, an arm draped across me, or her head nuzzled into the back of my neck, depending on how I happened to be facing (usually turned away from her light).

Again, I was surprised. I’m usually a fairly light sleeper; for years the easiest way to wake me was to whisper my name. I don’t know why, but I respond to "Nathan" as well as an alarm clock. I found it strange that where a mere murmur usually woke me, manhandling did not. So a couple nights later, I lied. I rolled on to my side while she read, then gradually changed my breathing pattern. I deepened my breaths, slowed them to a most un-hurried pace, and feigned sleep. I’m not sure how long she read, but after the light went off, I felt a warm body nestle up behind me, throw an arm over my side, and let loose all tension from the day.

And I thought, "Goddamn."

And I mean that in the most amazing of ways.

Sleep and scent combine in ways we don’t always realize, and Lydia’s nuzzling ways provided new insight into how we were now relating to one another. When living with another, everything becomes as familiar to your senses as your eyes, sometimes even more so. During a week of performances at the Chicago Improv, I lodged at my friend and fellow comedian Joe Hamilton’s apartment. After the Sunday show I drove home to Iowa and crawled into bed somewhere around two in the morning. Lydia immediately curled up to me, then paused, then pushed back a little.

"You don't smell like you," she said unhappily.

I hadn't thought about it, but there is a certain security in the scent of your lover, a familiarity that you react to unconsciously, and positively. When I moved in, the condo smelled like Lydia; every time I returned to it her scent filled my nostrils and made me feel peace. Returning from Chicago, I smelled like Joe Hamilton’s apartment and guest bedding. It being dark and Lydia being half asleep, she was relying on senses other than sight to relate to me, and the fact I "wasn't me" set off confusion in her.

Thankfully, the situation was rectified the next morning after a shower in which I washed the stench of other off me, and after which I tore off several sheets of toilet paper for my final starfish of drying.

Lydia laughed at me for it and reminded me she herself dries 100% of her body with her towel.

And she wonders why I do the laundry so often.

* * *

As any grade school child can tell you, there is a natural progression to relationships. After you are discovered in a tree, “k-i-s-s-i-n-g,” first comes love, then comes… well, not marriage. The kids skipped a step.

Lydia’s friends had us engaged well before I did; our second Christmas together had them all bundled together and whispering invented gossip into her ear, “He’s going to pop the question! We just know it!” I could only imagine the chagrin they wore when this did not come to pass. “Oooh,” they then justified, “Valentine’s day is coming up!”

What her friends didn’t know was: I was saving up for an engagement ring, I just didn’t want to get engaged in such a cliché manner. Popping the question on a holiday seemed too trite; I wanted my approach to come out of the blue.

Around Valentine’s Day I dropped half the cash necessary to procure Lydia’s dream ring, but didn't tell a single soul. Not because I didn't feel I could trust anyone, it generally never crossed my mind. I wasn’t bursting to share my secret; I was approaching the next stage of my life, and was doing so contentedly.

Eventually, I shared the news with he would be my Best Man, Brian Jones. I told Brian about the ring for two reasons: One, we had been on the phone the better part of an hour and out of things to discuss when he asked, "So, anything else going on?" I started out naturally enough, "Not that I can think of," when it popped right in there: "Oh, wait. I put money down on a ring." It wasn't an announcement, it was an afterthought.

The second reason I told Brian is: he lived almost a thousand miles away in New Orleans. Though he and I carried a friendship all the way back to Jr. High, we rarely saw one another and Lydia had never met him; who the hell would Brain be able to tell that the words could somehow end up in Lydia's ears?

Oh, fate, you fickle, funny fuck.

Two days after I told Brian of my impending bending of the knee, Lydia came home from work, excited: "I’m going to a conference in New Orleans! I'm going to meet your best friend!"

Really?

I mean, really?

The jewelry store had informed me up front it would take four weeks from the order date to have the ring crafted and the stone set, yet somehow Lydia got asked to attend a conference before it would be ready. Suddenly, the one person in the world who Lydia would never meet before I had the chance to surprise her was the one person she would be hanging out with.
Brian had already informed his wife Chris I was gearing up to propose, so when Lydia visited they treaded lightly over certain topics. Apparently one dinner conversation became fairly amusing when Lydia herself brought up the lack of an engagement ring on her left hand, but, Brian and Chris held their tongues, and Lydia returned to Iowa as clueless as ever.

I said I wanted to pop the question in a surprising fashion, and easily decided the best manner of doing so: while she was sleeping. Lydia hates, hates, hates to wake up in the morning. And she hates to be woken up at any time. So, being the kind of fella that I am, a few days after her trip to New Orleans I woke up at three AM and silently stole out of the bedroom. I grabbed a handful of votive candles, fashioned them into a heart on the countertop and lit each one. I positioned the ring in the center of the flames, turned on the stereo, set the song "Open," by Peter Gabriel, on a continuous loop, then returned to the bedroom to nudge away.

"Sweetie," I whispered. "Get up, you have to come see something."

Lydia resisted. She was expectedly groggy, but eventually cracked her sleep-caked eyes just wide enough to see me staring at her with a shit-eating grin.

Normally, such a smile and request meant I wanted to show her something one of the kitties was doing, but not this time.

Not this time.

If it seems somewhat dismissive that I didn't excitedly tell anyone about the impending event, it's because I felt very little in the way of special about the whole thing.

If anything, I felt comfortable. There was no weight upon my shoulders, or worry in my eyes. In fact, it felt like the most natural thing I've ever done.

I’ve said it in the past, but it bears repeating: therapists, friends, family and psychologists will all ask you the wrong question: "Have you ever been in love?"

Of course. Everyone has. Who cares?

What should be asked is: "Have you ever felt loved?"

When you can answer yes, your life will begin to take shape.

And I felt loved.

* * *

I was thirty-six years old the first time I saw my father smile. There are natural milestones in life; we celebrate certain ages due to advancements we make. “I’m sixteen, I can drive!” “I’m eighteen, I can vote!” “I’m twenty-one, I can drink! Well, legally, that is. I’ve been drinking since I was sixteen.”

Thirty-six will be etched in my memory as the age my life finally started to make sense. I had the moment of awareness involving my father, I met Lydia, and somehow granted my mother absolution from sins she had never committed.

A few months after being exposed to my father’s happiness, I was visiting my mother. Out of the blue, she started sobbing. I don’t know what brought it on, but she sat at her kitchen table for several minutes, crying. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and a thick molasses of mucus ran from her nose. Invented guilt sent her into this state of mind, and the words she spoke were so odd I could barely comprehend them.

"I’m sorry," she choked. "I just want you to know I’m sorry. I did the best I could. Your father and I both did the best we could. We were young parents and Ned and I did the best we could in raising you and Amanda. We just didn't know what we were doing, but we tried; we did the best we could. We just did the best we could."

I let out an uncomfortable giggle, a defense mechanism acting as the nervous response to a situation I was ill prepared to witness and too immature to address. I’d long known I was an accident, the first child born to two people not ready for the shotgun's pump, but for the life of me, at that moment, trying to imagine blaming either of my parents for either my existence or life, I was coming up blank. I grew up in a household filled with secrets and cold emotions, affairs and hidden anger, and we moved so often I never learned what maintained friendship was. But I didn’t think any of that was done to punish me.

The self-help lobby of America has latched onto two tools to make people feel "better" about themselves: blame, and invented guilt. The former is for those who like to believe we are not responsible for our own actions, lives and dealings with others. People like that point fingers and invent enemies. Invented guilt is a trickier bit of mischief, and is for those who want to take the weight of the world upon their shoulders. Whether it be their responsibility or not, they believe their life fails to live up to the expectations of others, and thus usually feel the need to apologize for invented misbehaviors.

My mom, for the record, loves self-help books.

A multitude of these betterment books discuss forgiveness, the idea is you need to free others from their transgressions against you while simultaneously asking them to do the like. If you do not, you will remain stuck in your "Spiritual Journey." While I agree with the concept on certain levels, the problem comes when you are asked to forgive not deliberate action taken against you, but something the person created in their own mind. The process becomes a cop out, a tool to first invent blame, and then forgiveness for a transgressionless action. Forgiveness, in such a situation, becomes almost an attack.

While I’ve felt exceedingly unhappy from time to time, even for years on end, and though I’ve even questioned whether or not any of the waking moments ever endured are worth it when added up against either the day to day mundane of pain, I’ve never been so disconnected from reality as to blame others for my lot in life. In any situation, I am ultimately responsible for my own actions. I can be fucked by any relationship, business, romantic or otherwise, but at the end of it, I have to look at my actions, and how I entered into the position to get fucked in the first place. So I don't know that I’ve ever actually uttered the phrase "I forgive you" to anyone, because I’ve either not blamed them their actions, or the offense is one grievous enough not to be exonerated from.

Standing in front of my mother, her sobs weakening in strength and composure getting the best of her again, I may have simply smiled. Not out of tension or an inability to connect mind with mouth, but a smile of situational confusion, one arising from a moment that tickles the heart.

And I explained to mom that I couldn't forgive her.

After all, I’d nothing to blame her for.