Reader, I Married Him

[mallorys_camera]

Max tells me he cannot imagine his parents married to one another.

And yet we were!

This photo was taken in the earliest years of my marriage to Bill before Max was born. 1983? 1984? Something like that.

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I met Bill at the Café Roma in Berkeley.

The café is still right across the street from the University of California at Berkeley’s Law School, so Max gets to view the site of his parents’ cute meet practically every day!

Back in the day, the law school was called Boalt. But Mr. Boalt was an unrepentant racist, one of the catalysts of California’s late 19th century Chinese exclusionary policies, and these are more enlightened times. The school dropped the name 10 years ago.

In the 1980s, I was a demon bike rider.

I rode as often as I could. Often with Bibbit. (Bibbit! My heart still aches for you.) Very long rides of 50 plus miles that took me down into Moraga, Orinda, and Lafayette several times a week. Shorter rides of 20 miles practically every day.

My daily route went through Berkeley from Derby Street where my little apartment was to Spruce Street where Rik’s baronial mansion sat. Up Spruce Street – a rather precipitous climb – to Grizzly Peak Boulevard. Round the swoop of Grizzly and down, down, down Claremont Avenue in a dizzying rush.

I’d just finished this ride and had repaired to Café Roma for an invigorating café latte with three shots of espresso. I was sitting outside at one of the little wrought iron tables writing in my diary. My bike was pushed up against the table.

Then as now, I spent an inordinate amount of time writing in my diary! But since computers were only just being invented, and I certainly didn’t have the beaucoup bucks to buy one, I was scribbling in one of the oversized black vellum artists’ notebooks I carted everywhere around with me. Probably in purple or green ink. I had a thing for purple and green ink. Probably with a Rapidograph. I had a thing for really, really, really fine pen points.

I felt something on my neck.

And turned around to find a young man staring intensely at me.

The young man looked exactly like Gerard Depardieu!

No, no, no. Not the gargantuan and disgusting Gerard Depardieu of the present tense who regularly waters carpets of first class sections on various Air France flights with his piss.

But the Gerard Depardieu of Le Retour de Martin Guerre, which at the time was one of my favorite movies:



The young man also had a bike leaning up against his table.

The young man and I continued to shoot furtive glances at each other over the next 20 minutes, and then I got up to use the bathroom.

When I returned to my table, the young man was gone.

I felt a little disappointed. A little forlorn.

But look! There was a yellow sheet of lined notebook paper lying on the black vellum cover of Volume 3,243 of my Collected Journals!

I opened it. I think you are very attractive, the note read. I would like to see you again. If you concur, here is my number…

Reader, I married him.

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In other news, it’s raining hard, and it’s very warm, so the snow banks are disappearing fast.

I am in one of those moods where I feel like everyone in the world hates me and probably with good reason, although when I start to think about it, I realize, No, no, no, they don’t hate me – because I am far too insignificant to expend strong emotion upon! They merely dislike me. Tepidly! If they think of me at all.

I attribute this mood to the lack of ambient sunlight and to the fact that the government shutdown closed my favorite running trail so that I could not get outside and commune with nature in the way that feels most convenient to me.

I mean – I could have gone outside and communed with nature.

You can always go outside and commune with nature.

But it wouldn’t have been convenient!

When I’m housebound, I always make excessive use of social media, and social media is the devil filled with virtue signalers who deplore my politics!

Really, I should just delete my Facebook account.

But then I wouldn’t be able to commune with other DiLucchios on the Web!

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And now it’s time to toddle off and sculpt June Miller’s (imaginary) romance with exciting, charismatic Secular Jew who migrated to Brooklyn and became a Hassid after World War II because all his relatives died at Terezin. He is only using her for sex! But naturally, I can’t warn her.