Welch, WV 1982
My granddad expertly weaved his mammoth Buick along the winding, cramped road high above our coal-dusted Appalachian town. I kissed him on the cheek and hopped out of the passenger side door. I was running down the steep steps that lead to the kitchen door when he laid on the horn causing me to jump. He was waving my cotton candy colored Member’s Only jacket out of the window.
As I grabbed it, he puffed on his stumpy cigar and said, “Don’t let that little Italian boy kiss you.”
“Granddad! Tony is my best friend, not my boyfriend.”
My best friend opened the door for me and I was smacked with the warm, sweet smell of the freshly baked cookies his mom was pulling out of the oven. She put them down and gave me a hug before Tony and I bounded into the layered, rolling yard, his floppy eared Basset Hound, Elvira, clumsily trailing behind us.
Tony turned to me and asked, “Wanna play Dukes of Hazzard?”
He was Bo. I was Daisy.
Our first date was under way.
Tony and I spent as much time as possible together when we were in Kindergarten and first grade. I went to his family’s giant Sunday dinners, almost falling over the first time I saw a homemade pizza complete with its own shiny elevated tray and I tried to impress him with free candy bars and sodas from my granddad’s bar.
However, in the middle of first grade my world started to unravel. After 35 years of marriage, my grandparents got divorced. And, on a frigid January day, a couple of weeks after my birthday, my mom sat me down and told me that the man I had called dad for the first seven years of my life was, in fact, not my father. She went on to inform me that the long-haired man that often drank Budweisers and listened to records with her in the evenings was my real dad – and that they had walked to the courthouse and gotten married earlier that day.
When school was over for the year, I tearfully climbed into the back seat of my new/old dad’s Chevy Nova, loaded down with boxes and suitcases, and waved goodbye to Tony.
Morgantown, WV 1995
He was skinny and he had a mustache. His Levi-clad leg was bouncing up and down on the rung of the wooden desk chair and he was fidgeting with a clown puppet that my friends, Meredith and Erin, inexplicably had in their dorm room.
My grandfather was undoubtedly spinning in his grave because I immediately wanted to let that Italian boy kiss me. But, I played it cool, said something along the lines, “What’s up? Do you always bring your clown puppet with you?” He gave me a wry smile and went back to worrying the poor clown.
I may have momentarily kept myself from making out with him, but that was it, I was done.
Tony and I have known each other since we were five years old. We are now approaching 25 years of being a couple and in September we will have been married for 17. We have grown up together. In many ways, our love story is, if not a fairy tale, a damn good story to tell at a party.
However, when you’re recounting a love story over a cocktail, you gloss over the behind the scenes work that it takes to navigate from being children to raising children. Surely no one wants to hear about that period after your baby was born when filled with so much bitterness and contempt over his freedom, his lack of understanding about how hard it was to be a mom, that you could barely stand to look at him. You leave out how there have been times that you were so afraid that he would leave you that you decided it would be less painful if you just pushed him away.
You share how you listened to Janis Joplin and Willie Nelson through the static filled speakers of your mom’s yellow VW Bug as she drove you to elementary school together, but leave out how this man was the one who scooped you up off of the floor the day you found out that your mama had left this world. Everyone listens with rapt attention about how there wasn’t a dry in the house when you walked down the aisle to “Ice Cream” by Sarah McLachlan, but it would definitely make them uncomfortable if you told your audience how he slipped one of his strong arms around you and whispered how much he loved you when Jay-Z’s “Forever Young” played at your little brother’s funeral.
But, it’s the parts of the story that I leave out that makes me fall in love with my husband over and over again. It’s the fact that he leaves the house before sunlight so that I can stay home with the magical little creature that we created a decade ago. It’s that we can have a whole conversation without saying a word and that he sends me ridiculous puns and memes that he knows will make me giggle. It’s that I love how he smells like leaves after he has been doing yard work and that he once grilled my Mother’s Day dinner in a torrential downpour.
It’s that he is still my best friend and my Bo Duke.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
