Something More Than Minestrone: It Started With A Bowl of Soup

I guess you could say it might have started with that bowl of minestrone at The Cajun last week (I almost drove into a pole,” he admitted this week. “Honestly. I almost hit a pole trying to drive out of the parking garage, just watching you walk away.” To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never had that effect on anyone just by having a bowl of vegetable soup with them).

I suppose you could say it started when what came next was my taking him up on his offer to throw Basil over his fence en route to work the next morning, let her enjoy a day running through the yard with his yappy dog Spam and sunning herself on the deck. Dropping her in the morning meant picking her up at night and as she was inside the house when I arrived instead of stationed near the gate in her usual place, that meant I came in and invariably visited for a minute.

The next evening after leaving her there, I stayed more than a minute. I stayed long enough to have a beer with him and talk about work stuff and local news items from the Tribune and the respective books we were reading, which isn’t terrifically unusual for us. The next night when I came to pick her up, he was re-reading an article in the paper, and waved it at me.

“Look what’s out,” he said as I took the paper from him. It was a review of the new movie, “Gentlemen Broncos”, by the producers of “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre”, both of which we’d seen and laughed all the way through because they contained the kind of dry, over the top and oft-underappreciated humor that appealed to us both.

“I’ve got to see this,” I said, more observation than anything else.

“When do you want to go?”

And there, really, is where I guess you could say it started.

We saw the movie over the weekend. He picked me up at five and we saw it at a theater in the south end of the valley, alone in the theater except for 14 guys who arrived in two groups and took up almost the entire row in front of us. As I mentioned, the humor of the movie’s creators is pretty generally under-appreciated.

It wasn’t quite seven when we left the theater. “Let me take you to dinner,” he said, “being as you wouldn’t let me buy the movie tickets.”

“I’m the one who brought up seeing the movie,” I said, and then agreed to dinner but only if he chose the place. We were surrounded by them in the theater’s vicinity, so it shouldn’t be difficult.

“Let’s go somewhere closer to home,” he said, suggesting a restaurant I hadn’t been to in six months, where it had been the location of a first date with someone I wound up seeing for six months. I started to suggest somewhere else, then decided it was stupid to judge a restaurant by a memory and besides, I’d eaten there many times in the past with Brent, as well as with Owen, so stop being ridiculous and superstitious. Feeling good about that resolve, I felt even better to note, once we arrived, the place was packed and there was a twenty minute wait.

“Some place else?” Owen suggested, and we wound up at the steak and seafood place near the golf course. “You realize,” he observed, pulling into the lot, “we’re repeating our first date.”

“Not really,” I corrected him, although our first date had been a movie (The Prestige) and dinner at this very same restaurant. “Back then I had slacks on because I wasn’t sure if I should dress up around you or if you’d be OK taking someone out in Levis.”

The idea of worrying what I wore around Owen was pretty ridiculous now. Over the past eight years, between work and personal time, he’s seen me in everything from suits, hair buns and eye glasses to little black dresses, little red dresses, sweatsuits, ponytails, swimsuits, beachwear and, if I thought about it (I decided not to) even with and without pajamas. Funny to note how long it had been since I felt any kind of self-conscious around him. That first date, I suppose I was still a bit too aware of the fact that the man taking me to dinner was the same sportscaster on Channel 4 I used to watch religiously every night on the news even though I cared nothing about sports, a fact that wasn’t lost on Brent at the time. “Why,” he’d said more than once, “don’t you just call the station and ask if you can have him? Or should I just dye my hair black?”

No, I wasn’t uncomfortable around Owen and imagining ever feeling that way made as much sense as my ever feeling uncomfortable around Lainie, or anyone else I was good friends with. Comes a certain point you just enjoy each other’s company and nobody cares, really, what you’re wearing, and you don’t have to censor what you say, either. Or do, come to think of it. To put it simply, Owen was someone I was just as comfortable with at a black tie event as I was having a barbecue on his deck and letting out an unintentional beer belch.

I expected the standard operational Chicken Salad order from him, but he had clam chowder. Unable to decide on anything (the popcorn in the theater had been more than I’d needed, anyway) I opted for semi-healthy and ordered appetizers we could share. Asparagus with hollandaise, bay shrimp cocktail, and sautéed mushrooms. I had a glass of Pinot Grigio and he had a beer and he reminded me of the stop in Reno on our last trip to California, how the room service attendant had delivered what appeared to be liter-sized glasses of wine for only $4 a piece, much different than the ‘thimble full’ you’d be served in Utah. I guess that prompted the reminiscing about the last trip to the Wyn in Vegas, where I was up $275 on a penny machine on an initial $20 investment, and he’d lost $50 at the craps table in under 10 minutes, which made him less of a believer in craps and more of a believer in penny machines as I was up another $20 by the time he returned to my end of the casino. And we talked about the movie, recounting favorite parts, laughing again at the funniest lines, and it was, I realized, probably the most relaxing and enjoyable meal I’d had since….well, since a bowl of minestrone at The Cajun.

Which is probably honestly where it got started.

He drove back to my place and dropped me outside the courtyard at my request. “You don’t have to walk me in,” I said, thinking that would make it feel more like a date and this hadn’t been a date, just two friends seeing a movie and what the heck, we’d always had the same taste in movies, and turned in my seat to thank him for a really fun evening.

That’s when he kissed me.

Yes, my we’re-only-friends Owen kissed me. And I suppose what I’m going to have to say is that it shocked me so much, it was completely so unexpected, it had been nearly two years since I’d kissed Owen, that I never did get that ‘thanks for a nice evening out,’ just a, ‘gosh, thanks…’ that I hoped he understood conveyed my appreciation for dinner and a movie.

So I walked through the courtyard (I don’t know if he almost hit something driving out, as had been his luck in the parking garage) thinking, ‘well, we sure didn’t repeat our first date’. I’d worried through most of that first date that he’d try to kiss me and he hadn’t. That had come on the second date, when my parents were in town for the weekend and he’d taken us up the canyon to a little log cabin restaurant for brunch, then planted one on me as we walked Basil in the courtyard, my dad settled in front of the TV and my mom rearranging my kitchen cabinets. I hadn’t expected that one, either.

But then again, I thought, leashing up Basil after walking in my door and heading out with her for a pre-sleep walk, what did I know. A week ago I’d thought I was having a bowl of soup, and apparently there was a little more to it than minestrone.