Category Archives: Marriage

An Alternate Universe Donald

23 Tuesday Nov 2010

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Muppet as Michael Steele on The Daily Show Screen Shot, November 23, 2010. Source: http://tellingthetruthiness.blogspot.com

In light of revelations — skin-deep, that is — from FOX News’ not-so-dumb-butt Megyn Kelly in an upcoming GQ article titled “She Reports, We Decided She’s Hot,” it seems to me that I missed out. Not in taking photos that reveal arms, chest, butt, abs or flanks. But in the massive gold rush that anyone with brains and without a conscience could have been a part of over the last thirty years. That gold rush? The “I’m a conservative and will saying anything, true or not” gold rush.

If I had turned conservative while at Pitt or Carnegie Mellon, it would’ve opened up doors. More doors than have been opened to or for me over the past twenty years. Imagine, a tall Black guy with a doctorate and still in his twenties and willing to serve as a mouthpiece for low taxes on the rich, a minimal social welfare safety net, and corporatization of public schools and Capitol Hill? I’d be a senior staff person of the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation by now, with a 3-handicap on the golf course to boot!

But back in the days when I attended Pitt, conservatives were not nearly that organized. There were plenty of them, but not working to identify future leaders the way conservatives have at places like Dartmouth or Stanford or even Carnegie Mellon, my second grad school. No, at Pitt, most conservatives hunkered down in bathroom stalls calling people like me the N-word or offered me bananas through their scrawlings on the metal partitions and doors.

College Republicans and other conservatives were much more organized on Carnegie Mellon’s campus, and with nearly four years there, I could’ve joined at any time. I’d probably adapted my music list. I’m not sure Mariah Carey or Jon Secada would’ve gone over well with this group, much less Tupac or Wu-Tang. I definitely would’ve needed to shave the goat-tee, my signature look for most of the past seventeen years. And I would’ve started using a knife and fork to eat fried chicken for sure.

Still, these would’ve been small prices to pay for steady and well-paying employment. I would’ve hit a six-figure income before I turned thirty. And I would’ve easily been able to turn my history of multicultural thoughts and actions of African Americans in the twentieth century — Fear of a “Black”

John McWhorter at the ISMIL conference in Leiden, June 2008, downloaded November 23, 2010. Jasy jatere (in public domain)

America — into a book about the fears of Blacks and Whites of a new and dangerous multicultural world. I might’ve even been able to keep my title, without the word Black in quotes, though. It would’ve been a bestseller, and I would’ve offed Dinesh D’Souza and John McWhorter as the intellectual giants of conservative thought on race. Yay, alternative me!

I’m not sure if me and my wife of more than ten years would’ve made it past the boyfriend-girlfriend stage. Her views are less leftist and more amoral in some areas than mine. But I couldn’t see her supporting me being a mouthpiece against gay rights and marriage, abortion, education reform without community engagement and austerity cuts in public services. It probably wouldn’t have mattered how much money I made. All of my memories of marriage, of good times and bad, of arguments and making up, of Noah from pregnancy to seven — all gone. Only a person equally conservative and amoral — more than likely White, although Tara Wall or Amy Holmes are among notable exceptions. — would’ve likely married me or would’ve wanted to have a kid with me.

For some folks, this is a pointless exercise. I’m a liberal, a social-Christian, democratic-leftist, one with a handful of cultural conservative views around etiquette and public conduct that I wouldn’t impose on anyone except myself, a progressive, in a word. I didn’t have tons of opportunities to become a lucrative mouthpiece and writer for the Right. And I wouldn’t have taken them if I’d been taken to a strip club and given a suitcase full of $100-bills to be turned. Still, it’s good to dream. To realize that my life, such as it has been, has had so much more color and flavor to it than it would’ve in this Faust-Kafka vision of one of my alternate universes.

Mistake No. 3 and Book #2

19 Friday Nov 2010

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Culture Club, "Mistake No. 3" Single, November 19, 2010. Source: http://www.onlineauction.com

I’ve made many more than three mistakes in my walk as a writer. Mistake number three probably came around the same time Culture Club released “Mistake No. 3” off of their Waking Up with the House on Fire album in ’84. So many of them have come because I’ve either been impatient in making a decision or too tentative to make one at all.

Just with Boy @ The Window alone, I’ve probably made at least thirty-three mistakes. I should’ve started working on the book right after my conversation with my late teacher Harold Meltzer about my experiences, in February ’95. Even without Google, Facebook, MySpace, and so many other places to look, it would’ve been much easier to track down my ex-classmates and teachers. Instead, I single-mindedly pursued my doctorate and my doctoral thesis as if it were gold-pressed platinum. All the while asking myself if I was a historian first and a writer second, or a writer that just happened to be an academic historian?

When I finally did begin working on the manuscript, in the summer of ’02, I think that I was writing about four different books. It had an academic side to it, a look at magnet school programs and their inherent arrogance around diversity and race, not to mention intelligence, especially in the 80s. I was also writing narrative nonfiction, ala Eric Schlosser and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, as well as fitting in bits and piece of memoir. And Meltzer, during my second and what would turn out to be final interview with him, suggested that I might want to turn the project into a novel. Why fiction? Because, in so many words, I wouldn’t piss anyone among the living with a Mount Vernon connection off.

Boy, I had no idea how right he was! Not about making Boy @ The Window a work of fiction. But about how many people I’d turn off or have attack me just during the research phase of the project. More people turned me down for interviews than granted them in the first years. If I sold it to them as a research project, I could hear their eyes glaze over while discussing it on the phone or in their keyboard strokes in an email. I pissed off many more as I started to write, as I did more interviews, as I started my blog in June ’07. I found out that I was defiling sacrosanct ground when writing about “Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon.”

I mistakenly began to shop the manuscript around in looking for an agent almost before I’d finished my first full draft of it. I had an agent for Fear of a “Black” America, but I’d found her in ’99, and the industry had changed so much in the eight years before I started looking for one again. I found myself having to have a well-thought out marketing strategy without having defined Boy @ The Window as a full-fledged

Neil Diamond, "Love On The Rocks" at concert, November 19, 2010. Source: https://www.rockbackingtracks.co.uk/images/neil_diamond.jpg

memoir at this point. It wasn’t a disaster, as I managed to get about thirty percent of the agents I contacted interested enough to look at my unpolished manuscript. Before their standard rejections would come back.

Licking my wounds and being more patient, to continue to revise and re-polish and repeat for most of ’09 and this year was hardly a bad thing. Realizing that my wife never liked the idea of me working on Boy @ The Window was harder, much, much harder than any agent’s multiple-xeroxed form rejection letter. I’d been in denial about it for about three years. It was when I sat down at the end of ’09 to do a long-overdue overhaul of the memoir that she finally made it obvious to me that I’d violated some unwritten rule in our marriage about delving too deeply in my past. It was about a year ago that I realized that — at least on the subject of Boy @ The Window — I’d lost my significant other of fifteen years, who simply wanted and wants me to move on.

There’s no doubt, though, that the biggest mistake I’ve ever made as a writer was to choose to not see myself as a writer for the better part of two decades. That’s probably the reason why it’s taken me years to work on Boy @ The Window, why I’m still a forty-one-year-old late bloomer in this calling of mine. That I’ve made as many mistakes as I have and still remain hopeful about publishing this memoir is, well, both crazy and just the thing I need to get through, I suppose. My former AP English teacher Rosemary Martino was right about one thing. Writing really does take sacrifice.

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

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My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

 

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.

My Sister Sarai (Partial Repost)

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

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Sarai & Noah, November 2003

Yesterday, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven from complications from sickle-cell anemia. It’s a disease that can often claim one’s life before they reach adulthood. Even with our advanced medicine, the average life expectancy of someone with sickle-cell anemia is forty-five years. Not to mention the pain and infections involved in having such a body-draining disease.

As much as I love her, the fact is that Sarai probably shouldn’t have been here. Between the disease and what we were going through as a family in ’82, it’s hard to believe that Sarai managed to survive in the worst of our worst times. I had just gone through my summer of abuse at the hands of her father, my mother had struggled through picket lines because she didn’t want to lose her job (only to get her hours cut in half anyway), and we were eating as if there was a global famine crisis. By the time I found out that my mother was pregnant with Sarai, with my mother working part-time, I knew we were up crap’s creek without a lifeline. My cold and adult-like argument with my mother about aborting my future sister left me even more in search of escape than I had been (see February 9, ’09 post “Sister Sarai”).

For some reason my mother didn’t listen to me, giving birth to my only sister, Sarai Adar Washington on the ninth of February ’83, born in the middle of a snowstorm. I refused to visit my mother in the hospital in New Rochelle. I didn’t want Sarai, and was tired of watching my mother make incredibly bad decisions.

Sarai came home a couple of days later, obviously stricken with the disease, as she looked like she was in pain then. I was so mad whenever I was home in Sarai’s first days. Not mad at her. Mad with my mother. Even at part-time, she could’ve seen a doctor about her sickle-cell trait, and screened to see if her idiot husband had the trait also.

Even in ’82, even without his participation, through my brothers Maurice and Yiscoc, my mother could’ve learned early on whether both her and my then stepfather Maurice had the sickle-cell trait. She long knew that she had it, and I’d known about my trait since I was seven. I’d learn about a year later, in ninth grade Biology with Mr. Graviano, that with two parents, there was a one-in-four-chance with every pregnancy that full-blown sickle-cell anemia would be passed to a child. For the first time in my life, I saw my mother as an idiot.

By the middle of the summer of ’83, Sarai was obviously in trouble. She hardly gained any weight, all of her food had to be fortified with iron, and she only had “three strands of hair,”as my mother put it. It was more like a few dozen in three spots on Sarai’s scalp. She always needed help. Sarai even then was in and out of the hospital, in need of the occasional blood transfusion, and at time in excruciating pain.

With all of this, my mother would say to me, “See, that why you shouldn’t wish for an abortion,” as if I was supposed to feel guilty about what I said to her the year before because Sarai was sick. As if I had anything to do with her being here. I just gave my mother a weak smile whenever she’d say something like that, trying not to reveal my disdain for her path-of-least-resistance decision-making.

Despite all of this, I grew to love my sister, if only because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t her fault that her parents had about as much common sense as a wino on South Fulton Avenue in Mount Vernon on a hot day in August. Sarai wasn’t to blame for her own condition. And me suggesting that my mother get an abortion — it was obviously too late to get one by the time I yelled the idea at my mother — didn’t make Sarai one sickle-cell sicker than she already was.

Over the years, Sarai did get better, then worse, then better again. I stopped babying her by the time she was a teenager, but my mother didn’t know how to stop treating her like she was a toddler. By the time of the family intervention in ’02, Sarai was obviously ready to leave 616. She moved to Alabama for three and a half years, between ’05 and ’09, to live with her high school friends and to live a slower life away from my mother and the rest of us. Even though she still had many days with pain, and more in the hospital during those years, Sarai lived her life her way. I’m happy for her that she had those years away from 616, from Mount Vernon.

Of course, the story didn’t end there. Sarai’s sickle-cell anemia complications got worse, so bad that she ended up quitting her job and moving back to Mount Vernon from Alabama, where the medical facilities were allegedly better. The last week or two before her death, while far from pleasant, and somewhat expected, was still a shock to the family. For me, most of the shock occurred months before Sarai was born.

I only hope that someone somewhere finds a cure or at least a way to help people like my sister experience less pain and a richer, more vibrant life because of this disease. The good news was, that for most of her last years, Sarai carried on as if she didn’t have a disease.

Kiss From A Rose (or [sigh] “Hi” )

20 Thursday May 2010

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Fifteen years ago on this date, I re-met the woman who’s now my wife of ten years, Angelia on a PAT-Transit bus in Pittsburgh, the old 71B-Highland Park into Oakland. It was an eighty-five degree Saturday afternoon in the ‘Burgh. I decided to treat myself to a movie, Batman Forever, mostly because I knew Val Kilmer was in it. After seeing him act as well as he did in Tombstone, I figured I needed to give it a try. I needed a break, between the euphoria of the Spencer Fellowship and the depression from the fire at 616 that had rendered my family homeless.

So here it was, 3:15 in the afternoon, with me dressed in a blue t-shirt with blue basketball shorts and sneaks. I was standing at the corner of Highland Avenue and Penn Circle South, across from my apartment building, waiting for a bus. The 71B showed up first. I jumped on, sat down on the right-hand side in a front-facing seat. As soon as I sat down, I saw her, sitting right in front of me. It was “Angela with an ‘i’,” Angelia, like that Richard Marx song from ’90.

The thing was, I had a dream that she showed up in the Saturday before this one. I hadn’t seen Angelia in more than two years, hadn’t given her any thought. But it seemed weird that she would just show up a week later in the flesh.

So I said, “Hi Angelia!,” excitedly, wondering what she was doing on the bus. She paused, said “Hi” with the heaviest, stop-bothering-me sigh I’d heard since my high school days. That didn’t deter me. I coaxed out of her the fact that she was pissed off with Carnegie Library because a book she was looking for at the East Liberty branch wasn’t there, even though the catalog said it was. It was a conversation that was one-sided, with Angelia doing most of the complaining.

I listened, and thought, “Yep, same Angelia, same weird Angelia.” But since I was weird also, I kept listening. Finally, she asked me what I was up to. I told her about school, my Spencer Fellowship, my family’s homelessness situation. I kept it brief. I mean, I hadn’t seen her in two years.

By the time we reached Oakland — me to catch one of the 61s to Squirrel Hill to catch the movie, Angelia to walk over to the main branch of Carnegie Library — we exchanged numbers, with Angelia saying, “It was really good talking to you.” I wasn’t so sure about that myself, but at least, she didn’t seem as weird as the woman she was five years earlier.

I went to see the movie, and it sucked, just like Angelia said it would. I walked home, got together some grub, and through all preconceptions out the window. I gave her a call to tell her that she was right about the film. We ended up talking for more than three hours! It was the first time in a long time I had talked to a woman who wanted to hear what I thought about, well, anything, at least anything outside of sex. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Marriage in the Un-marriage Age

29 Thursday Apr 2010

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DNA Marriage, April 28, 2000

Yesterday made it ten full years since me and my wife Angelia exchanged marriage vows. Even though this is a great thing, this marriage and love of ours, it ain’t been a crystal stair either. Meshing our ways, our likes and dislikes, our approaches to life, and our baggage can still cause me and Angelia more gray hairs, not to mention ulcers. Noah has taken up much of our lives and time over the past seven years, leaving precious little time to work on our relationship. None of this takes into account the ups and downs of job security, financial stability, going back to school, and taking chances with our careers that can take their toll on any marriage, no matter how much spouses love each other.

The average long-term marriage lasts about fifteen years, so if I or one of you were to take a cynical perspective, you could say that our marriage has already reached the zenith, due to decline into a slow, painful cycle before the big D occurs. After all, we all have our issues, me in particular. With my socioeconomic background, I still find it amazing sometimes that anyone would fall in love with me, much less marry me. Prior to 2000, I never made more than $21,000 in a year, and the most I’ve made in any year in our ten-year marriage is $80,000 (although, that number represents most of our years together). With the financial problems we’ve had the past three years, including the feast and famine of consulting work — not to mention my work to publish Boy @ The Window — most women would’ve moved on for that reason alone. That’s the nature of marriage in an age in which money justifies almost everything people in our world do.

But there’s more, much more. I’ve discovered through a decade of marriage how truly imperfect and human I am. The high level of emotional control that I demonstrate in the workplace or in the classroom can be missing at times in my marriage. I care so much about making all of our lives better that I sound like I don’t care at all. I’ve been tempted — although not seriously so — about three or four times by other women over the years. Nothing approaching adultery has ever actually taken place. But temptation in one’s mind is still a challenge, one that all of us adult humans face. I’ve felt a number of times that a week away by myself on South Beach would be a good thing for both of us. And all of these things have been expressed in so many ways by Angelia over the past ten years as well.

So how does this thing work, this marriage, when our lives are so unbalanced, when we’re still growing and maturing as individuals, when dramatic changes occur in our lives, when there are children involved? I don’t have any major words of wisdom. All I know is, that after ten years, I still enjoying talking to my wife about everything. God, social justice, education, teaching, sports, music, sex, politics. I don’t tell Angelia every thought I have at every moment of every day the way I used to. But I do prefer to share things with her first before approaching any of my friends or current and former co-workers. I really can’t imagine having this kind of relationship with anyone else.

If I had to do this over again, would I get married again? Probably not. I’ve learned that when it comes right down to it, any serious relationship, in order for it to be a successful one, requires commitment, communications, and a rooted and grounded love. Having a piece of paper in the form of a marriage certificate, or even exchanging vows before God does not guarantee much but heartache and debt if the marriage doesn’t work out after the honeymoon. Marriage as we know it today is a two-century-or-so institution that sells us the dreams of harmonious, monogamous heterosexual relationships that are nominally sanctioned by God, but more directly, sanctioned by our government and economic system.

Knowing this, knowing all of the hard work that’s involved in maintaining a marriage, requires the ability to separate a relationship from the junk that has accumulated in our minds about how a marriage ought to be. Whoever thinks about their marriage in this way has ignored the human factor, the fact that we married another human being, not a robot that can only express unconditional love. Ultimately, for a real marriage to work, it means rejecting most of what we’ve learned about marriage from poets, priests and politicians (as Sting and The Police would say). It means having a marriage based only on who you are and who your spouse is, not one on societal, religious or others expectations. Which is why I would have the nerve to suggest that, looking back, I might not have gotten married to Angelia, at least in the way we define it these days.

Oh, I can hear it now. The voices of my more godly acquaintances, of men and (mostly) women complaining about what I’ve suggested. That I should feel lucky that I’m with a woman who understands me and would be willing to allow me to post this sacrilegious document. And how dare I go against the dictates of my God and Christianity. Fine. Believe what you will about me. I actually don’t care. But understand this. Any real commitment to another human being that involves supporting each other’s growth and maturing, the development and raising of another child, a love that endures through hardship and suffering as well as the good times, doesn’t need marriage as justification.

And yes, I’m a lucky man. To have the love and support of a wonderfully weird woman who understands me in ways few people in this world, including my mother, have even attempted to. To have been able to spend almost fifteen years in love with my best friend, with ten of those in marriage. If it somehow doesn’t last, if the worst occurs somehow, I still believe that I will always cherish the years we’ve had together, and the future that we will continue to strive for and in.

First Contact

22 Thursday Apr 2010

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I met my wife Angelia (pronounced Angela, or, as she would say, “it’s ‘Angela’ with an ‘i'”) twenty years ago today. It was an early spring Saturday evening, one that’s typically crispy-cold in Pittsburgh. Our mutual friend Bryan was throwing himself an apartment-warming party. Bryan has recently moved into an apartment building in the Bloomfield/Friendship section of the ‘Burgh. I vaguely remember Bryan complaining that his one-bedroom apartment was $420/month, which, in Pittsburgh even now, could get you a one-bedroom apartment bigger than our first place in Silver Spring. Still, he was happy to have his own place, to not living at home or with roommates.

I was in a rare place of peace at the time of Bryan’s party. I had found my stride in my social life, with real friends, a solid group of acquaintances, and wonderful times. I was doing well academically without it being an obsession. And I was working, but only fifteen hours a week, leaving time to do so many other things like going to clubs and hanging out all hours. Bryan had become one of the folks in my circle that I could talk to about school, work, social issues, and music. Even though has was also the only person I knew who truly liked the late Barbara Sizemore, a professor in the Black Studies department at Pitt who had served as superintendent of DC Public Schools in the mid-1970s. To say that Sizemore was abrasive would be an insult to Brillo Pads mixed with pumice. But Bryan loved her, and though I had figured out that Bryan was gay, I assumed that he also wanted to marry her.

I was a bit surprised to have been invited to one of Bryan’s parties, which were sophisticated compared to the college-scene parties I’d been to before my junior year at Pitt. Now I’d see something like that and say that Bryan was trying too hard for an Iberian/Bohemian effect, minus the weed and the crystal meth. But back then, it would’ve been like being a working-class character on Kelsey Grammer’s show Frasier, all awe-struck by the expanse of space that I saw when I first walked in his place on April 22 two decades ago.

It was a place that I would’ve never, ever complained about back then, with a small foyer, a kitchen with more counter space than we have even now, and a bedroom larger than my one-room firetrap of an efficiency in South Oakland. Bryan had turned his living room into a meet-and-greet-and-dance space, with red-colored light bulbs and red candles lit. The beverage of choice was Bryan’s own margarita concoction, blended just right. Blended so well that I was on my third before I realized that there was a ton of alcohol in it.

That was when I met my future wife for the first time. It was the first time we had met, but not the first time I’d ever seen here. Six weeks before, on an eighty-plus degree March day just before Spring Break, me, my friend Kenny and a couple of others sat on the corner of Forbes and Bigelow. We were across the street from the Cathedral of Learning, outside of the William Pitt Union, rating the young women (and men) as they walked by. It was fun of course, and some of the women knew what we were doing, so we did catch hell at times. Then this tall woman with a middling skirt walked by, her head held up high, her cheeks as puffy as a bird’s, her hair and makeup done really well. Kenny said, “She looks thirteen!,” and we all burst out laughing as she walked by. She didn’t notice, oblivious to the humor we were having at her expense.

Angelia was Bryan’s boss at his part-time interviewer job with Campos Market Research. Bryan was such a connector/networker (as Malcolm Gladwell would describe him if he knew Bryan back then) that he could become friends with almost anyone in those days. Bryan had apparently invited the two of us to the party to meet, to set up two of his Black friends, as if height alone would bring us together. Angelia was already in an on-and-off again relationship with a third-string Pitt football player, one whom I’d met before. A man with a head bigger than Donovan McNabb’s, but whose athletic skills were average at best. Angelia had recently become a part-time student at Pitt while working full-time hours at Campos in downtown Pittsburgh. She probably wasn’t in the mood to meet a young man about sixteen months away from graduate school.

Bryan introduced us. She was just over six-feet tall, with her hair permed and teased. Angelia was wearing a pink-and-white checkered blouse, with the front-fringe tied into a knot. She wore a long, flared dark-denim skirt with sheet pantyhose and short heels. She was attractive. Until I started talking to her. Angelia’s voice, with that Pittsburgh accent, reminded me of listening to a duck as it bit another one in a pond in a fight over pieces of floating bread. She sounded weird, and she seemed bored. Then, when Angelia asked me about school, and I told her that “It’s going well. I have a chance to get a 4.0 this semester,” I might as well have said that “I’m doing much better than you.” At least according to her. Bryan apparently asked Angelia, “What do you think?” “He’s arrogant!,” she apparently blurted out in response. When Bryan asked me what I thought of Angelia, I said, “She’s weird!” Given what I was like back then, me calling someone weird was saying something.

Needless to say, we didn’t exactly hit it off. But I kept bumping into her in the weeks after the night at Bryan’s margarita-ville. During my two weeks working for Campos, thanks to Bryan. During the summer on Pitt’s campus. The following fall, where we inadvertently ended up seeing a movie together and going out to eat afterward. It would take nearly six years to get beyond “arrogant” and “weird” to significant others. And another four before our marriage. I guess this disproves the idea that you have only one chance to make a first impression.