It happened on March 28, on top of a giant granite boulder called “Enchanted Rock,” outside Austin, Texas. As you can see in the picture, it was a misty, chilly day, and my vaguely pinched look says I’m still stunned, clinging to my future husband in the wind at the top of a rock.I’ll backpedal to catch you up. When I was working on The Spaghetti Afterlife, I followed one of those pesky emails into Classmates.com one day. I thought if I looked at people from my high school, I could access raw, teenage memories and feelings long buried. (If you went to high school with me, don’t panic – you’re not in it.) Sure enough, it helped me a lot. Scared me, sometimes. A few months later, in 2005, I got another email from Classmates.com in my rarely-accessed Yahoo account: Put up a profile for free! Add a picture! As I read other peoples’ profiles I realized, hey, we were all a bunch of hormone hostages trying to get through it, but my graduating class somehow lacked the ardent school spirit of previous and forthcoming classes; I guess we just weren’t that into it. Lots of other people had the courage to put profiles up there, or at least get themselves listed, so why not? I’d been dredging up stinging adolescent memories for months, adding more and more emotional whomp to my story.
So I put up a profile and a picture of me emerging from the sea after a dive off the coast of Maui. Then I forgot about it for several years until I was stuck on the phone with a new client last spring, letting her prattle on about her inexhaustible child custody issues. I can be very generous that way. But the relationship went pear-shaped a few months later and I now restrict new client prattle to short periods, with the understanding they’ll be charged my hourly fee, in ten-minute increments. As my customer droned on back then, I wandered over to my Yahoo account which I hadn’t looked at in several weeks. In the midst of all the spam, there was an email from Wayne, writing from his current home town of Austin, Texas.
We were smooching buddies back in high school. I was one year ahead. We met in the drama department during my senior year, when I was newly ripe for partying on the north shore of Long Island…I’ll just gloss over that part vaguely and tell you that we only got as far as second base. Then I got another boyfriend and eventually went away to college. For a more fictitious, fun-filled account of this era, I recommend The Spaghetti Afterlife, still awaiting publication. But back to the story: Wayne and I lost touch after I left Long Island. I wandered out west while he entered into a decade-long marriage. Many other things happened. Once again, let me refer you to The Spaghetti Afterlife, although I recently caught myself telling Wayne a story about my past when I realized it was something I’d made up in my novel.
So contact was reestablished nearly thirty-six years later. We couldn’t keep our hands off our keyboards! Wayne began doing one of the things he does best: creating personalized radio shows. He’s a profoundly talented DJ. He sent me half a dozen shows before heading off to Germany and the UK for the summer. Even then, he wrote to me every few days, revealing much about his past and some mutual friends from high school. He finally made it to New York, where free evening and weekend minutes came back into play. We spoke effortlessly for hours at a time. Sometimes he called late at night from a park bench in Sea Cliff’s Memorial Park, one of our old make-out haunts. I could practically feel the humid, salty air. Two weeks later he was back in Austin. Many more phone conversations ensued. We lent each other movies and books through the mail, and another set of his radio shows arrived. Then late one night as I lay in bed listening to a live version of “Let My Love Open the Door,” I quietly fell in love with him.
Wayne came up here to Oregon in October and not only did we get along fabulously in my tiny little house while it rained almost every day, we also pulled off a sweet, seven-hour road trip to visit friends in Bodega, California in my tiny little car. Then he went back to Austin, winter happened, Christmas, the ski season, a new cat named Sophie, a part-time design job with the local Humane Society, and all sorts of stuff, but I’ll stick to the story.
I went down to Austin at the end of March, for Wayne’s birthday. He’d planned this one-day trip out to a little German-flavored tourist town in the Hill Country. It was a chilly day, with light rain on and off most of the way out there, but he’d been wanting to take me to this place called “Enchanted Rock,” for quite a while. We packed a picnic lunch and everything. So I figured, it’s his Birthday Week and we ought to do the things he wants to do. I have to say, although lots of things may be bigger in Texas, after having spent the last 11 years in the Cascade-Siskiyou region, their hills aren’t bigger. We finally arrived at the Enchanted Rock State Natural Area and began to hike up this giant batholith. See the picture? It was like a moonscape, with bits of cactus growing out of its crevices. A rugged, 425’ hike up a slippery granite mound. I focused on finding a path along the cracks of the boulder, where scrubby flora grew.
“You’re a real trooper,” Wayne commented.
“I know.”
Other hikers appeared out of the mist now and then. Near the top, we tucked ourselves into a small cave-let near the top to avoid the blowing spray while we had lunch. Wayne slipped just before we sat down, and we later discovered that his 5-Years-at-Dell watch had taken the brunt of his fall and stopped. (He loves that kind of auspicious stuff). We ate, chattering away in the little cave opening. We have a combined seventy-two years worth of stories to catch up on. Afterwards, he wanted me to go just a few steps higher, to the very top of the boulder, to see the official marker. We picked our way up there through the fog and bent down to read the embedded steel shrine to granitehood. Then I stood up to stretch my legs and he stayed down. I was clueless. He got up on one knee and said, “I had an ulterior motive in bringing you up here.”
Can you believe I was still clueless? Then he took my hand and asked me if I would marry him. I would love to have seen my face just then. Wayne says it was a nervous bit of fun to watch as I attempted to process what I’d heard. One yes and several hugs and kisses later, another couple appeared out of the mist and offered to take our picture, so here we are. We took a more scenic route down the rock, with cactus flowers and lots more boulders to hang onto. A cardinal fluttered around us outside the visitor’s center as we got ready to leave. We celebrated at an ice cream parlor down in Fredericksburg.
Meanwhile, I got a kick out of Austin. It’s such a fun town! Texas swing sashays out of the clubs on every other block, and I ate myself Tex-Mex silly. We cowboyed up real fancy a few times to go out and listen to some great music. Luckily I still had my lizard-skin-toed cowgirl boots I’d bought in Santa Monica after an art show back in the early 90s. There was even a surprise fireworks display a few blocks away from an outdoor Jimmy Lafave show we were at. But we like Oregon, and I have property here. Besides, I can’t imagine living very far from Mt. Shasta…
...so there’s a ton to figure out. One good thing is, I’m probably too old for a huge, disgusting zit to appear the night before the wedding, whenever that turns out to be. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around all this. It’s my first time. Did you ever imagine you’d hear the words “Leanne” and “engaged” in the same sentence? I figured it ought to be recorded somewhere, such as here. I have a new file on my computer titled, “Wedding Stuff.” It tickles me when I look at it, like it belongs to someone else. This may take a while for us to plan, but we’ll keep you posted.
