The Boy Who Wanted To Marry Me

Several months ago, I wrote a couple of posts – here and here – about men who restored my faith in, well, men. In those posts, I explained that I’ve had doubts in the past about men’s innate ability to love… like truly, madly, deeply (great movie, by the way) love. L.O.V.E. Oddly, these doubts have never extended to random, select men in my life, such as my dad or my husband or my Papi or Stanley Tucci.

Anyway, despite the revelations that prompted the posts earlier this year, I’ve been having a little crisis lately where my doubts have come creeping back in. It’s completely unfair. It’s heartless of me (there’s irony for you). There’s no reason for such a judgment.

This all was weighing on me until earlier today. Then… I remembered Dominick. Ah, Dominick, my romance from my last two summers of high school and the first man to ask me to marry him.

If my best friend or my sister or my mom read this, they’ll shake their heads in that way we women do when we’re feeling simultaneously exasperated and nostalgic. But they’ll hopefully also remember what an amazing young man Dominick was back then.

Dominick lived not far from Yonkers, I lived in southwestern Connecticut, and we met at the Jersey Shore. We hung out in a large group of kids from around the tri-state area who had gravitated toward each other upon arrival at the beach and who were relatively inseparable for the brief time we all spent at the Shore each summer.

Somehow, among all of these kids and all of the fun and craziness and distractions, Dominick was interested in me. Me! And boy did I like him. He was tall and lanky with the most beautiful smile and a sweet, tender blue-eyed gaze that simply emanated kindness. It was that kindness, that genuine consideration for others, that drew me to him. He was athletic and fun and a teenager through and through, but he also was sweet and gentle and caring beyond words. I was crushy beyond crushy. Serious puppy love. I was distraught when it was time to return home and beside-myself-excited when we returned to the Shore the next summer to find him and the rest of our crew already there and looking for us.

What I forgot about Dominick until this morning was that he asked me to marry him. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a “Someday I’m going to marry you.” It was an honest-to-goodness proposal of marriage. True, there was no ring involved, and the question was asked by phone, but he really did ask me to marry him when I was 17 and he was 18 (or was he 19?).

The ring I did not receive. Or have offered. Or ever see in real life.

Why, you may ask, would this simple act by a boy – because he really was more boy than man still – restore my faith in men?  There are a few reasons. First, more than the proposal itself, the memory of Dominick reminded me of what a beautiful soul that boy was, how selfless and thoughtful. Second, despite your initial thoughts about why a boy would propose marriage – yes, I can read your mind – there was no underlying motivation of the get-in-your-pants nature driving this.  Dominick proposed to me in winter, when we weren’t at the Shore. He lived at least an hour from me, and I wasn’t allowed to drive out of state to visit or meet up with him, so I pretty much never saw him aside from the week or two we would spend near Seaside Heights. So proposal or no proposal, he wasn’t gettin’ any. And… my family wasn’t scheduled to go back to the Shore the following summer. Finally, when I told Dominick I couldn’t marry him because I wanted to go to college, he offered to come with me and support me in whatever dream I wanted to pursue.  

Dominick and I stayed in touch here and there until I left for college, and then we fell out of touch for good.  For years, I kept a photo of him in my wallet (remember when we used to do that sort of thing?). When I was sad or lonely or stressed, I would look at his sweet face and would feel a sense of calm knowing someone so kind-hearted was out there in the world. Then, at some point the photo disappeared. Years later, my mother saw Dominick in a magazine article featuring his wife, who apparently is brilliant, and we were simply thrilled to see him looking well and happy.

So now it’s midnight, and tomorrow the world is supposed to end, according to several misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar. And if the world truly does end, at least I can feel some sense of relief that my faith in men has yet again been restored thanks to that boy who long ago offered to follow me anywhere, who told me he wanted to spend his life with me, and who made me feel truly, madly, deeply loved.

Milk and Cookies

When I was pregnant with my little ones, and for quite a while after they were born, I would bake myself a couple of fresh chocolate chip cookies every single night and eat them along with a cold glass of milk. *sigh*  Few things in life are as delicious or as comforting.

Thank you, Nestle Toll House.

It’s been a rough week, what with our ongoing battle against lice, so this evening, I indulged.  And it was good. So good.

As you can see, tonight’s cookies were served on fine Wall-E ware. Yes, we are bastions of high style here. (Ooh! Ooh! Name the movie: “Why don’t you do what you dream, Bastian?”)

Moving on…

So while I enjoyed tonight’s chocolate-y deliciousness, I found myself thinking about the symbolism of the cookies and milk and Wall-E.  I’m an English major.  It’s what we do.

Depending on whether we’re talking about the cookies or the movie, there’s a little bit of metaphor, a little bit of allegory, but it boils down to nostalgia – there’s that old nostalgia thing again – though this time with the added twinge of fallacy.

I’m not going to go too in-depth, don’t worry, but let’s think about this. Cookies and milk are yummy and fabulous on their own, sure, but there is also a bit of harkening back to childhood and comfort and calm.  Even so, cookies may be scrumptious, but they also are not healthy.  Their sugary, buttery, chocolate-y goodness can negatively impact your health if you indulge in too many.  It’s something we don’t think about as kids, but something that sneaks in as we’re older.  We ignore the bad of cookies at times like tonight, when I choose to think about yumminess (and not about lice)… but the knowledge lurks and lingers.

Same with nostalgia. The phrase “you can never go home again” doesn’t mean you physically can’t go home, obviously, or that you can’t move back to the place where you grew up and be happy.  It means that when you return, you’ll see things through new eyes, and sometimes what you’ll find is that things are different than you remember from childhood. Places. People, too. And while the rosey, heart-leaping blush of returning – for a visit, for a reunion, for a reconnection – can highlight the good and the joy in ways you never imagined, extended exposure can bring to light some less appealing attributes that youth and inexperience held at bay.

It’s like how in Wall-E, people were encouraged to “remember” Earth in a way that didn’t really exist anymore. When they returned to Earth, they had to come face to face with the reality. Similarly, sometimes what you envision in your memory, what you try to make real in the face of the fallacy of your self-designed illusion of how things once were, butts up against reality. Hard. And that can be disconcerting. Even a little heartbreaking. 

The reality also can be simply lovely, as I found when I went home this past summer. But that’s for another post at another time.

So anyway, tonight, I baked a couple of fresh chocolate chip cookies for myself. And I ate them along with a glass of cold mik. Tonight, they were simply… cookies. And they were delicious.

Cheers.