The night we didn't meet

Nineteen years ago tonight, I laid eyes on my husband for the first time. Sounds auspicious doesn't it? It wasn't. Far from it actually.

After finishing up coursework for my master's degree -- working full-time and going to school full-time -- I was ready for just about anything, socially speaking. So when a friend told me she was two-stepping, I was interested. Country dancing had taken hold across the country not just in Texas. I had wanted to try it. While athletically inclined, I have no dancing skills and line dancing was my last chance.

I met Julie and her sister-in-law at the dance hall. We took over a small table with four chairs by the dance floor. In no time, this tall lanky guy sauntered up (he actually walked, but were in a country bar so “saunter” it is). He was wearing a short-sleeve checkered shirt, blue jeans and boots. He didn’t look much the cowboy. No hat, and his close-cropped dark hair looked more military than country. His smile and ease in talking with Julie and her sister-in-law let me know this wasn’t the first time he’d been at their table. I didn’t expect him to ask me to dance, but he didn’t nod or even glance my way much less give me a “Howdy M’am.”

 

I didn’t exist.

 

After a few pleasantries with the girls, he and Julie headed for the dance floor.

  

A few minutes later, the two were back at the table just long enough for Cowboy Joe to ask the sister-in-law to dance – again without a look my way. On and on the evening went. Was this some sort of line-dance initiation? I waited for one of the “all dance” dances -- the equivalent of cotillion or a bad sock hop. The men form a ring inside; women outside. Dance with a partner and rotate onto the next. It wasn’t much, but I was out of the house and I’m was out with men.

Between going to school full-time and my daytime career, I had been too exhausted to date or do anything else. My big treat was doing laundry on Saturday nights, watching the TV show “Sisters,” and missing my only one in Tennessee.

During the months of graduate school, I could only think of how pitiful my life as a single woman had become. I was moderately successful in the work world, but my love life seemed an abysmal failure. We’d gone through two presidential administrations in the time since my last real relationship. The President of the United States was dating more than I was – and he was already married.

I spent most of my first night at Cactus Annie’s as a spectator except for the “all come” dances. The tall guy kept coming back and asking my two friends to dance, with hardly a glance at me much less an invitation to dance.

“What a tall, rude man,” I thought.

Yep, that summed up my first impression of the man who would become my husband.