Sarah Vaughan & The Perfect Slice
Sarah Vaughan & The Perfect Slice
Episode 02:13:2023 - Prompt: Romance
Where romance took me…
Lover man, oh where can you be?
My mother sang Billie Holiday’s song of longing like a lullaby, and I wondered if it cursed my subconscious with its messaging. Holiday laments having no one to love her. She’s heard the thrill of romance can be like a heavenly dream. She goes to bed with a prayer. It ends unresolved.
Someday we'll meet,
And you'll dry all my tears…
Sarah Vaughan’s version (the one my parents played most)
When people ask where my partner and I met, I say…
The Huntington Library.
I was moonlighting as a prep cook with a taffy-pink scarf tied over my hair, cutting hundreds of perfectly clustered mint sprigs. He was an assistant party manager with curly brown hair and a headset, trailing a hint of weed behind him.
We were two among many preparing a four-course meal for a billionaire’s 70th birthday. We shared our shift meal around an Igloo cooler, talking about music by candlelight. I gave him my card before I left. He called the next week.
Years later a close friend told me she didn’t know the story about working the party, only that my partner and I met on the grounds of the historical library. In my friend’s version, I was sitting in a window writing in my notebook. My partner was roaming the grounds with his guitar. We laughed at the corniness of this image, but I realized how much we long for the thrill of romance.
The nights are cold,
And I’m so all alone.
Which leads me to romancing the everyday…
After seventeen years together,
My partner and I find romance in our daily routine. We rarely discuss it, but when asked for our secret, I say, “Neither of us do what we don’t like doing.”
Chores, and the designation or discussion of chores, kill romance. If each of us stays on top of our favored chores, there’s no need to talk about dishes, laundry, shopping, cooking, or recycling.
Every act feels like a gift, rather than a burden.
“These floors are clean,” he declares after removing all of the rugs and mopping the entire house.
“I made cinnamon bread,” I say when he comes back from a run. Baked butter, cinnamon and sugar warming the air.
But, I really love toast.
I usually hunt down our local baker on her delivery route and walk home wondering what kind of toast I’ll make that morning. Olive oil, raw garlic, and homemade hummus? Butter and honey? Cream cheese and peach jam?
Oh, so exciting!
I would then put the bread in the toaster and, no matter the setting, smoke would dance out within seconds. “Straight into the trash!” I’d say swearing, the burnt slice still smoking. Did I buy a new toaster to replace the old one? Nope. I preferred ejecting the slice manually, still with blackened edges, and cursing.
For my birthday a few weeks ago, my partner handed me a large, gift-wrapped box. What could it be? A beautiful toaster.
My first slice was golden bliss!
Lover man, you are right here, you dry all my tears, and you make sweet, sweet….
When someone knows you so well they surprise you with the obvious, that’s romance.
YOUR TURN: Using ROMANCE as a theme, focus on the unconventional, non-Hallmark, non-RomCom gestures that surprise you (or how you surprised someone else). Don’t worry about being a “good writer”. Just get that sucker out in 150 - 200 words (basically, my Huntington Library section above at 170 words).
POST YOUR STORY IN THE COMMENTS SECTION.
Click the HEART when you read anyone’s post. Heart = Heard. Don’t comment on my or other people’s stories. For more about the rules & intention of this Zine, check the About page. Any questions, bring them up in the Forum.
Happy writing!
This year my husband and I will celebrate 30 years together. I pause writing this.
30 years.
We have been together longer than the time we didn’t know one another. We have done practically everything together since 1993. We came together through our band’s playing a Pro Choice concert in Baltimore, David standing with the “grunge dudes” in his band, them eyeing us Riot Grrrls up, and stating that he liked me the best as my band Womyn of Destruction played headliner at the 8x10 Club.
Three months later we are a couple. 2 years later we start a band. 28 years later we never stopped playing and touring together.
We opened a business up together creating a Record Store Cafe, the three things we love the most. Food, Coffee and Music.
We finish each others sentences at this point. We jokingly like to yell, “GET OUT OF MY HEAD” when I say that I want Sushi for dinner right before he was about to say the same thing.
We are also very role reversed in our duties in our marriage. He likes doing dishes and the laundry, which I hate doing laundry. He can’t use a power tool to save his life, but I love problem solving and fixing things with my hands around the house or the shop. He’s absolutely amazing at attending to our finances (which I absolutely am NOT and silently worry about a future (universe forbid!) without him). I love grocery shopping and cooking. He detests the super market.
He loves holding hands and snuggling. I sometimes forget that these things are important to him. Me, the dude.
So I write him random love notes on his salad dressing containers. He randomly asks me, while doing the bills, “ Did you know you are cool, Tiny?” To which I always reply, “Nope.”
These little things we say and do are the daily little valentines we have given one another for 30 years.
Here’s to 30 more.
New romance in your fifties is a little different from twenty or thirty years previous. For us, there were no illusions about what we were going to be when we grew up, because we were grown up. Yes, dinners, flowers, and wine, but we talked about our successes and failures, families, values, finances, and health. Yes, he gave me a diamond ring, which left me speechless, and kisses... "It's in His Kiss - that's where it is!" But what made me say yes? He cooked meals with me; one weekend he helped me put up a bookcase in my basement; he gave me a power washer for Mother's Day, so I could clean the green slim off the north side of my house and terrace. Just what I'd asked for. He listened, pitched in, and gave me "Atta girls!" Now that's romantic!