LOVE A DAY AT A TIME (PERSONAL ESSAY)

Who finds their true love at the local A.A. club?, I ask. We were two somewhat broken people in our late twenties, each previously married and divorced, and we had scars.

The people at the club called him Fuzzy John, and not just because of his ever-present cheap perms. Too much drinking and too many drugs had left him with strange quirks caused by neurological deficits. He could not be still for one minute for one thing. I thought of him as my little hummingbird. I swore I could see his heart beating beneath his shirt. He was so thin, too, that he looked like nothing but a shock of wild blond hair with dazzling blue eyes hanging on a vibrating reed.

He flew around when he talked, absently dropping cigarette ashes in paper garbage bags in my kitchen while I sat there wondering when his heart would give out from all that fluttering.

I wasn't worried about any romance developing. He was definitely not my type. The truth was I thought I was too good for him. I mean for one thing the last man in my life had a Ph.D. and Fuzzy John was a high school drop-out. Of course, the last man in my life had also gone and broken my heart by drowning.

"I know I'm not the man of your dreams," he once told me, "but I am the man of your reality." I laughed at the hard truth of it. I spent an awful lot of time with this man that was not in my league. He made me laugh and he was easy to be with. We hung out.

Because we were just pals I didn't have to get too embarrassed when he did Fuzzy John things like taking out his dentures at restaurants and setting them on the table. I didn't mind when he criticized my terrible housekeeping, or when he gave me a carton of cigarettes for Valentine's Day.

I walked down the street with him without embarrassment when he wore his every day outfit of khaki shorts with plastic sandals and white socks pulled up high. Books--reading-- were a sacred thing to me, and he said the only book he'd ever read in his life was "Valley of the Dolls" one time when he was in jail. No biggie. He didn't have to live up to my pretensions like most of the poor saps I had been involved with on a more serious, romantic level.

We went on like that for over a year--hanging out, laughing, bickering, and generally treating each other like bowling team members. But then one day something happened. He got to me. I don't know how he did it, but he got to me.
The truth was I had ignored the fact that I had known he loved me for some time. He didn't hide it too well, but he made sure not to either talk about it or show it.

He was in my kitchen, fluttering and dropping ashes in my paper garbage bags as usual. I had made us a nice meat loaf dinner because I felt like cooking. He started talking about how he had grown up cooking for his family as a small boy. He had also done the grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning and everything else because his mother was psychotic. She had just sat and talked to imaginary friends all day. His father was a stoned alcoholic.

Then he told me about how he managed to get himself dressed in something decent for eight grade graduation. Afterwards he went to the bar where his father could always be found. When he told his Dad he had graduated, his Dad gave him a nickel.

It was schmaltzy. I was a sucker. He was the first person I had ever been with that I couldn't trump with my bad childhood stories. I felt a lump in my throat and was embarrassed to find my eyes tearing up. It explained a lot of his hell-bent on self-destruction past.

I leaned over the congealing meat loaf to give him a kiss on the cheek and he pulled my mouth to his. Something ignited. I was thunderstruck.

I began imagining holding that fluttering hummingbird against my breasts until the fluttering stopped and he was peaceful and still. What was happening to me?

The next thing I knew we were on top of a pile of my dirty laundry because there as too much crap on my bed. It was a significant, surprising experience. It knocked me for a loop.

We almost didn't know how to treat each other at first after that. Were we still buds? Could we still just hang out and kid around or what? Did we have to get serious and be all yucky and romantic now?

We spent the obligatory time talking about "us" on my instigation. I pointed out that we were polar opposites in most every way. He shrugged. I told him I owed it to him to make it clear that we had no future. He reminded me that we both lived a day at a time in our recovery programs.

Once I complained that I had been used to getting poetic, eloquent love letters and that I knew I would not be seeing any of these from him. The next day I found a note on my bicycle at work addressed to "My little rock 'n roll" with a few plain-spoken, earnest sentences about how much he cared.

I found respect for him as I watched him work his A.A. program. He was always helping a crew of men new to the program. Sundays we had large dinners for all the newcomers. John would warn them between courses about what he would do to them if he caught them hitting on new women in the program.

He began attending G.E.D. classes. I threw a big party for him when he graduated, thinking of that measly nickel his Dad had given him.

I couldn't help but notice that my relationship with him was making me a better woman. I was becoming more caring and compassionate. I was far less pretentious and a lot of the things that used to seem so important to me now just seemed like silly posturing. I was noticing a lot more of the ways we were alike instead of the ways we were different. I felt I might have known him in a previous lifetime. Secretly I wondered if we were soul mates and having the thought made me feel about sixteen. Weren't we too old, jaded and wounded for a love like this I asked him? He told me that I made his every day brand new. I finally surrendered to the knowledge that I had been feeling kind of brand new myself.