Swmbt

July 21st, 2018

Today – this very day – twenty years ago, I met my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted. I mean, she wasn’t my wife at the time – that would be weird. But given that I remain, to this day, madly and giddily in love with her, I thought I’d tell you the story.

I was, at the time, shopping for a wife. It sounds slightly barbaric, I suppose, but I’d wanted to get married since, oh, I don’t know, probably sometime before I’d been born, and I wasn’t getting any younger, as the voice in my head was yelling, and my prospects, at the time, were fairly dim. My percussionist had recently fixed me up with a woman who couldn’t stand me on sight and the feeling had been fairly mutual. I had one more date lined up, and beyond that, the vast dark maw of bachelorhood, gaping in the distance, and I’m pretty sure I saw teeth.

And so. This last date was also an introduction, by a former coworker. I was to meet her and a pile of her friends in Harvard Square, on the green outside Grendel’s. So I put on some presentable clothing and planted myself under a tree in the appropriate place, trying to work on some lyrics. And a few yards away, there was a bench full of people, and this woman walked up to greet them, and boy, were they glad to see her. Hugs, hugs, hugs. And I thought to myself, “well, hell, I’d love to meet someone who commands that sort of loyalty and affection among her friends.” And I went back to my lyrics.

Those of you with a sense of literary drama know where this is going.

My former coworker drove up, with a bunch of other people, and I peered into her car, trying to figure out which one of the passengers was my date (oh, you silly boy, those of you with the program are shouting). She told me to meet them all at a restaurant nearby, and of course, those folks on the bench came along. SWMBT told us about her book tour, and I told everybody about my recent car trip down the East Coast, and then we went to Herrell’s for ice cream and sat in the bank vault and SWMBT teased me mercilessly about how I hate chocolate ice cream (be still, all of you – it’s vile), and later that evening my coworker hit SWMBT upside the head and pointed out to her that she’d been fixed up, and then there was the first date (otherwise known as the Job Interview) and the second date (otherwise known as the Bataan Death March) and three weeks after we met, I called my parents and told them I’d met the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and three weeks after that, SWMBT asked me to marry her, to which I answered in the affirmative, after a respectable, six-nanosecond delay. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It is said, by many, that songwriters have to be miserable to write great songs. For those of you who fear a happy relationship as a result, I am here to tell you that this guidance is utter horsehockey. The dreck I wrote back in my miserable days of bachelorhood is, well, dreck. Everything of mine that’s worth listening to – all the glorious, wise, silly, bouncy, snarky genius – is born of the freedom from worrying about the maw and its teeth. I have said, repeatedly, that I can’t write love songs, and it’s certainly not one of my strengths, but last year I said “Fie!” to that and wrote “Bliss”, which is a gleeful Turtles tune about SWMBT, the angry, bitter, silly love of my life, the one who makes it possible for me to walk down the street without begging strangers for a date. Thank her the next time you see her.

Comments are closed.