First attempted dates with my wife, 1980-1992

My Uncle Jack did his best to get me and my wife going out. He knew a keeper when he saw one. These are pages I wrote in my younger days chronicling the experience. Why she didn't grab me up at the mere sight of me, I'll never know. 

June 18, 1980

Today Uncle Jack was babysitting me, which is always cool. This time he told me to get on my tricycle and "haul ass" to someplace called Darien. He said I'd understand when I got there. So I made it onto the expressway and kept going until I got off somewhere where all the streets have numbers. Then I rode into this one house where they were taking a holiday picture and these two guys asked who I was and I didn’t say anything and the girl said You’re cute and I nodded and rode back home. Uncle Jack asked me She's pretty cool isn't she? and I said I think I want to eat ice cream for dinner and Uncle Jack said Ok, maybe next year.

Family photo in progress; perfect time for a drive-by photobomb.

April 22, 1981

Today my Uncle Jack made me go to this girl’s house in Darien. It was dumb. He told me we had to go and say hi to this girl and I would understand when I got older, but when we got there, I didn’t understand anything. She’s this short black-haired girl named Kim and she kept eating the whole time we were there. I said Hi and she said Who’re you? Then I said I’m Gregg and she said Oh whatever, and kept eating. Uncle Jack kept telling me You’ll understand when you’re older and I said Well I’m a minute older now and I still don’t understand and he said Just shut up and have something to eat. 

So we went into the kitchen and Kim gave me something called tofu. It tasted like nothing. I said You got any hamburgers? and she said Well yeah, but I don’t want to eat meat for much longer because cows are cool. I said What do cows have to do with hamburgers and she said that hamburgers come from cows and I said Yeah right, listen lady, I’ve seen cows and they don’t look anything like hamburgers. Then Kim asked if I liked the Muppets and I do so we talked about that for a while. 

Uncle Jack took our picture in the living room and said You can have this when you’re older. And I said, Oh, older like when I’m supposed to understand what I’m doing here? And he said Yeah. Like that. Then I noticed that Kim was pretty but by then it was time to leave, and when I got home there was a new Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends on so I watched that. Uncle Jack watched me, shaking his head, and said, Maybe when you’re a teenager.

Full disclaimer: That's really us. But I didn't like the living room decor, so I Photoshopped it.

May 12, 1992

Uncle Jack gave me a gift certificate to an ice skating rink in Darien today, don’t ask me why. When I got there, the crowd looked suitably hip and with it, so I kept my sunglasses, velcro-fly shorts and jeans jacket on, figuring that would help me blend with an obviously cosmopolitan crowd. It was then that I saw her, skating with reckless abandon across the ice, laughing at something her friends were saying to her. She was a statuesque five feet tall, and radiant in her jeans and pullover. 

I made my way over to her, elbowing several idiot friends of hers to the side as I did. “I see you skate,” I said to her in my most debonair voice. “I too am a skater. So let’s go out some time and skate together.”

Since I was mumbling out of abject cowardice, she didn’t seem to hear me. “Are they okay?” she asked me, gesturing towards two teens of her acquaintance, picking themselves up off the floor and looking somewhat peeved at me. 

I figured it was time to up the seductiveness of my approach. “I said DO YOU WANT TO GO OUT WITH ME!” I yelled at her, tapping her on the shoulder for persuasive effect. She tripped backwards, laughing at the utter imbecility of my suggestion. 

In front of me was a kid with a camera. “Quick, kid, take a picture!” I demanded, dropping to a knee and striking my best, most thoughtful pose, the girl behind me still laughing at the idea of us being socially intimate in any way whatsoever.

Dutifully, the kid snapped our picture, promising to send it my way as soon as possible. “Remember this moment,” I breathed huskily into the girl’s ear as she picked herself up off the ice. “This is the moment you met your soul mate.”

“Who are you again?” she demanded, gesturing towards the security guard and pantomiming a taser firing off and my body writhing in agonizing pain. 

I straightened up. “Bam!” I said confidently and ran out the door, the guard and friends on my heels, a police dog in the distance barking angrily. “Phil Collins rules!” I crowed in their direction, flipping a pair of devil’s horns.

That night, after Uncle Jack bailed me out of the DuPage County Jail (a hellish experience if ever I went through one), I explained to him what happened, and he shook his head wearily. “Maybe in another four years,” he mused. “If you’re lucky.”

Full disclosure: That's really us. But I airbrushed my acne out, and made her look slightly more graceful.

Hypsos' Biography

As recorded by the Venerable Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum et Magister Longum, 731 CE.

In the beginning, God was quite the practical joker...
A few weeks later, the Vikings sailed south from the frigid wastelands of Norway and Denmark and reached the coast of England, planning to conquer it. They stepped off the boat, took a look around, and said to each other, "This weather sucks." They then said forget it, but not before beating up the local yokels and ditching some of their own wimpy warriors, who remained in England, trying to bully the yokels some more. The yokels wised up, however, and learned to tie the wimpy Vikings' shoes together when they weren't looking. This led to the rise of the Anglo-Saxons.

Hundreds of years later, the Normans arrived on the shores of England. William the Conqueror stepped off the boat, took a look around, and said to his men, "This weather sucks." But he conquered the island anyway, and he brought his native Norman culture to England, which is why we now have English castles with moats and drawbridges, and we can say things like "I am chivalrous with brunettes" without Bill O'Reilly beating us up.

So the English flourished, building more castles, adopting more French words, fighting tournaments, trying to capture the Holy Land, and bitching nonstop about the weather and how it sucked. Meanwhile, Hungarians and Saxons were off in Eastern Europe, envious, because their weather sucked too but they weren't conquering the known world, but instead running away from Huns and Visigoths. They tried to fight the invaders valiantly, but the invaders only burned their villages and tickled them till they cried and wet their beds. This led to the Crusades.

More hundreds of years passed, until one day, in 1749, a young apprentice journeyman, Donald Long, stepped out of his London flat onto Milk Street, took a look around, and declared, "This weather sucks." He then hopped on a boat and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean so he could be the first person to set foot in the New World. (Long didn't pay much attention to current events, since most newspapers back then used words too big for his shrunken head, and in fact spent most of his time ogling the back page descriptions of nannies available for hire.) This intrepid adventurer, upon reaching America, apprenticed as a book printer, and soon started his own business. The church and local government, however, condemned him as a "printer of lewde ande lasciviouse bookes" which did "challenge and tormente our God-fering peopleses" because of their "graytuitouse sexe scenes" and "excessivee" use of the letter "e," even by eighteenth-century standards. This led to the rise of Doubleday Publishing.

Long was banished, subsequently flipped City Hall the bird and settled in Maryland, where his descendants thrived until some of them got to missing England's sucky weather and migrated to the Midwest. Meanwhile, Eastern Europe was fought over and eventually overrun by Cossacks and other filthy-looking brigadiers. One John Vrabyl, and his wife, Hannah, decided to split before the Soviets came, and head for America. John had previously tried to join the Cossacks, but he failed the entrance test when he was unable to dunk a basketball with just one hand. The loving and devoted couple set up shop in Ohio and took up snuff and making bathtub gin.

In the intervening decades, several big wars were fought, disco made its triumphant arrival, and Kraft Foods, Incorporated raised itself out of the might of artery-clogging cheese and flavored, aromatic tobacco with just the right blend of outdoorsiness and chic urbanity. The giants who ran the corporation decided they needed people to crunch numbers, and hired a boatload of them after agreeing to throw them a party first At this party, one descendant of Donald Long, Stephen, plucked up the requisite courage and started chatting up a descendant of John and Hannah Vrabyl, Patricia Vrabel. The two of them hit it off instantly (or after five or six drinks--records here are spotty) and got married in time to ride the wild roller coaster of bell bottoms and disco fever that was Glenview, Illinois' Seventies Phase.

The loving couple's son was born a few years later, and he stuck around in the Midwest, complaining about the sucky Illinois weather but not having the moxy to leave it, as did his forebears. He met a woman from lands far away, exotic and wild, and took her to the St. Charles Food Court for a first date. She agreed to marry him anyway, and her family wept grievously to hear it. Then she kicked him out of the house for a month and he went to D.C. This led to the rise of this blog.

THE END

From the family scrapbook.