Man Plans, God Laughs
As I was saying in my previous post, I was living large and loving life, working full time as the day shift supervisor in the Respiratory Therapy department of a local hospital, thoroughly enjoying my single life after swearing off of men and dating for good.
Our department was full of young, single women. It was also full of therapists from other hospitals moonlighting at ours since we had a reputation for paying well and not over-working their employees. As a result, there was a steady flow of applicants showing up for interviews. A lot of those applicants happened to be male, much to the delight of the women in the department.
As I was making my rounds one afternoon, my pager went off with a message from the secretary to call the department STAT. She picked up the phone on the first ring and said, “You’ve got to see this one!” No explanation necessary. “I’ll be right there!” What can I say? Just because I had sworn off men, I had no qualms about looking. Nothing could have prepared for what came next.
I used to think that “tall dark and handsome” was just a cliche. But there he was, in the flesh, sitting in a chair waiting for his interview, and looking up at me with a big smile on his face. He was so handsome I was rendered speechless, which has only happened a handful of times in my life.
I found my voice and said a cool “Oh, hello there.” Then I walked down the hall to my boss’s office, grabbed him by the lapels (okay, so I’m exaggerating, but that’s what I wanted to do), and said, “You have got to let me sit in on this interview, and we’re going to hire him, even if he’s an idiot.”
He wasn’t an idiot, and he did get the job. But on his first day he didn’t show up for work, putting me in the awkward position to call him and find out if he got run over by a bus, or simply decided he didn’t want the job after all.
A woman answered the phone. I didn’t know why it bothered me, since I was no longer interested in romance. But I was profoundly disappointed.
He apologized profusely. Overslept, alarm didn’t go off, it would never happen again, etc., etc., he’d be there soon. Uh huh. Whatever. I reminded myself that all men were jerks, and I needed to get a dog.
But then we started working together a few days a month. He was smart, handsome, funny, and tall. Really tall. We had some interesting conversations, and that’s how I discovered that the woman who answered the phone was his fiancé, and they had just moved from Atlanta to Denver. Again, there was that twinge of disappointment, even though he was rather lukewarm about her for someone who was about to get married.
He was also into sports, something his betrothed found annoying, since she expected him to spend every evening sitting at home with her. Somehow, the wedding got put on hold. Somehow, they broke up. And somehow, we ended up on a date. For some reason, we cautiously began setting some boundaries. I went first.
I told him that I took ballet class 3 evenings a week as well as Saturday afternoons, and that was non-negotiable. He almost fell to his knees in gratitude before he told me his baseball and basketball schedule. That’s when I thought this relationship might work. Then I found out he loved dogs. That’s when I heard a choir of angels singing.
We dated for 7 years. Still a little snake bit, I didn’t want to go all in. Until I knew he was The One. The One that I could spend the rest of my life with. And I never looked back. While I was planning, God was laughing.
To be continued…..
