D-Day minus 149: The First Dinner

In World War II D-Day was the defining battle that turned the war around. In my life D-Day is the day I learned of the affair. It is the day that changed my marriage and my life.

It’s amazing to me that things spiraled out of control and turned so horribly wrong in such a short time. My husband (I will call him Brad) and I met when we were just kids, 15 and 16 years old. We dated for 9 ½ years and married when we were 25 and 26. We lived a comfortable middle class suburban life. After five years of marriage our first son was born and 4 ½ years later our second son joined our family. Throughout the years we had a myriad of dogs and cats, and moved several times. Our marriage was strong. Our friendship was strong. We really were best friends.
Obviously things changed. I think they started changing about 3 ½ years ago, and will delve into that shortly. This entry is about July 2, 2008: our first dinner with our new friends.

Our oldest son (I’ll call him Liam) is an avid hockey player. He loves it, which is funny, because he’s a pretty quiet, easy-going guy. But on the ice, he’s tough and strong and unfazed by the roughhousing and bullying going on around him. In fact he thrives on it. When he skates, the joy is noticeable. I think he is more comfortable on skates than he is in sneakers.

Brad was not a hockey player. He played pond hockey growing up, however his sport of choice was always basketball. But watching Liam play hockey intrigued him. Brad is not comfortable being a spectator – he has to get involved. So he volunteered to help the coach. This evolved into becoming an assistant coach, then becoming the head coach of our son’s team, and finally signing up to play hockey in the adult league. This is his style. He jokes that he has an addictive personality. I think the term obsessive fits too.

Anyway, adult hockey took place on Wednesday evenings. Off he’d go with his body bag loaded with several hundred dollars worth of shiny new hockey equipment. Afterwards, he and another player ( I’ll call him Mitch) who also happened to be an assistant hockey coach of our son’s team would go somewhere and grab a beer. Mitch’s son played on Liam’s team. He’s a terrific kid, and he and Liam get along really well. Brad and Mitch would have a beer and solve the world’s problems. They both were interested in Buddhism and investigating Zen and meditation and they bonded quickly. Brad looked forward to those beers almost as much as he looked forward to playing hockey.

On July 2, Mitch and his wife “Susan” invited Brad and me over to their house. Brad was so excited. He really enjoyed his time with Mitch and loved the idea of all of us becoming friends. I was happy too. Dinner was great. Delicious food, light conversation, lots of laughter. It was just adults too, which is a rare occurrence. There were five of us: Brad, me, Mitch, Susan, and “Nancy”, who is a friend of theirs. We chatted about safe topics since we were all getting to know each other and someone pulled out some Tarot cards. None of us knew how to use them and we were trying to follow the directions but really we were making a mess of the readings. It was a great first get together.

At the end of the evening we were standing by the door saying our “we-must-do-this-again-soon”s. Mitch was standing in the middle of the three, with Nancy on his right and Susan on his left, and I thought “Wow, it’s like he has two wives”. I got a chuckle out of my thought and shared it with my husband in the car on the way home. He wasn’t too happy with my comment. These are nice people and I shouldn’t be making fun of them.

But it’s a thought that revisited me just a few months later.