Amelia of Duyvken wrote in her comment on Friday's entry: Well, I am glad that you went to USC because I am assuming that facilitated the meeting with LB?
No, Amelia; that would be too easy. I'm sure you never intended this, but you've given me an excuse to write an exhaustive time-line chronicling the story of LB and me.
1965 Jen is born. She's the 4th in a family of 4 children. Though her siblings are 8, 11, and 14 years older than she, they all have the same parents.
~ C H I L D H O O D ~
1983 Jen goes to Cornell.
1985 Jen meets who will eventually become her ex husband. He is a year ahead of her in school, and is graduated later that following spring.
1987 Jen graduates and moves to Long Beach, CA to be with future ex: an aerospace engineer who works on the MD-11. Jen learns that the MD-11 and the M-16 are very different things.
1987 Jen takes ill.
Explosively, painfully ill.
Late 1987: Jen is diagnosed with Crohn's and spends the next 6 months on 60 mg of prednisone daily. The less said the better. Jen feverishly completes grad school applications while sick, a superstitious insurance policy against being ill in the fall of 1988.
Spring, 1988 Jen has a bowel resection. It's considered elective at the time, though surgical findings include an enormous abscess that had at most ten days left in it before it could be expected to rupture. Phew.
Late Spring, 1988: Back in Long Beach, detoxing from Prednisone. Jen and the future ex are in a stalemate that will continue until 1991, through their collective post grad education at Brown, USC and Berkeley: they fight about why they are not married. He feels they should not marry because they fight too much. She feels if they were married, they'd have nothing to fight about.
Future historians have approached this stalemate as a potential PhD thesis and then abandoned it, all arriving at the unanswerable question of why prestigious universities were willing to not only admit but give funding to two such elementally stupid people.
Fall 1988: Jen leaves for Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. There she begins a platonic, yet fraught with romantic tension "friendship," with Joe Sullivan, a fellow fiction writer in the grad program. At first meeting she renames him Lawn Boy, or LB, given his resemblance to the boy who used to cut her parents' (and your parents') lawn when she was growing up.
The name sticks. The Artist Formerly Known as Joe likes it. If there's any injury to his pride at a nickname that implies harmlessness, it is replaced by joy at the very act of being named.
But LB commits several unpardonable mistakes: he is too nice, too polite, and has a bad haircut. He writes Jen letters and mails them, even though they live less than a mile apart. He leaves letters at Jen's place of work, embarrassing her. Finally, she confronts him (over the phone) and asks what he wants. He says, "I would like to try a relationship with you."
Jen has more words at her disposal now, but at that moment, the only one she can come up with is weenie. It sounded weenie. Back in Long Beach she is hip deep in marriage roulette, and here in Providence, someone is inviting her to a penny ante poker game.
She makes LB an applesauce raisin loaf and thrusts it in his hands when he makes a move to hug her good-bye, before Thanksgiving break. For the rest of the semester, she and LB do not speak.
January, 1989: Jen has a horrific meeting with Robert Coover where she learns that her primary role in the Brown MFA program is to fund the TA-ships and scholarships of the students Coover does like. Shattered, she walks the mile back to her apartment. As she passes the intersection of Waterman and Thayer, she sees LB heading into a bank with another girl. He looks animated and solicitous, as does the girl. Any lingering doubt about leaving Providence that Jen may have had is gone in a poof of gold medal flour.
About a week later, Jen transfers to USC. She moves in with her future ex husband and his poor sod of a roommate who did nothing to deserve being thrust into the middle of a fight to the death between two rabid weasels. One evening, the three of them watch an episode of Cheers where Carla poses the question: Hey Frasier, can I ask you something? When you and Lilith wake up in the morning which one of you is the first to to scream "What have I done?"
The roommate looks at Jen and future ex slyly to see if they're finding this sitcom moment eerily familiar, but they are too deep in their battle of wills to notice.
Fall, 1990: Future ex is admitted to the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Jen stays at USC. For you Aussies, this move puts them about seven hours apart by car. Neither of them is willing to put their education on hold to follow the other. A marriage proposal would make such a sacrifice well worth it to Jen, but no proposal is forthcoming. Briefly, Jen breaks up with the future ex.
During this time she writes a letter to LB. She's not sure he ever wants to hear from her again and she dislikes the ambiguity a lack of response would give, so she includes a self-addressed stamped envelope for him to return. Sending this envelope would mean, "Letter received -- no further contact desired."
LB writes back and uses his own envelope. It turns out that he got the graduate student spot on the literary journal -- the one freed up by Jen's departure -- and he's now dating Maxine, the editor that Jen stood up. LB and Maxine will go through three years of on-again off-again torture, but that's their story to tell.
As Jen and LB continue to exchange letters and frustrating phone calls, Maxine comes up with a special nickname for Jen: That Slut from L.A. Yes, she renamed Jen, and it's a name that acknowledges how dangerous she is: how could Jen not love it?
June, 1991: Jen and the future ex marry. Every atom in the universe tries to let them know this is a bad idea, including but not limited to Jen's colon. They rent an adorable house in the Miracle Mile district. By now Jen has her MFA, and future ex has his MBA and a job.
Oddly enough, being married has not decreased their fighting one bit. During games of Pictionary, idle discussions about celebrities, and musings over why certain cities observe Trick-or-Treating on days other than Halloween, they prove that there is no topic that can't become a source of contention. They bet on fights in which neither of them has a dog. Speaking of which...
August, 1991: Jen and future ex get a dog: Ruthie, the noble miniature dachshund.
November, 1991: Jen and the future ex drive to a pet supply store to buy a dog carrier, so that Ruthie can accompany them on the plane when they go to Milwaukee for Thanksgiving. Since there is no place to park in front of the store, Jen runs in and makes the purchase while future ex drives slowly around the block.
As Jen waits for his car to return, she has a thought: do I leave now, or do I wait until my parents are too old to help me get out of this? This thought seems to come from nowhere, and for a moment, Jen is paralyzed and does not notice her future ex, parked right in front of her, angrily honking the horn.
Thanksgiving, 1991: Jen and the future ex go to Milwaukee, to spend the holiday with Jen's family.
Back in the dark ages, frequent flier miles were fairly new and came with all sorts of strings attached. One big string was "black-out dates." Namely, the miles could not be used on any day when you could possibly need them, like the days surrounding all major holidays. For that reason, it was decided Jen would stay in Milwaukee until the following Tuesday, so that her return ticket could be paid for with miles. Since the future ex had to work, he had no choice but to return on Sunday.
The Monday after Thanksgiving, 1991: Jen is at her parents' house, and she hears the mail come through the slot in the front door. At one time there was a little metal box that would catch the mail, but it fell off years ago and now the mail just lands on the floor.
OFD, Jen's dad, has a quirk about the mail. He likes for someone else to pick it up from the floor, and then organize all the envelopes in one pile, face down, on the red table in the entryway. Periodicals go on top. Mail not addressed to him should be removed from the stack before he goes through it. All this is because he enjoys the elaborate ritual of going through the mail, carefully feeling the front of each envelope to see if there's a plastic window (boring: probably a bill). No window means it could be a check from an attorney: at that time he did a lot of expert witness work.
When Jen picks up the mail from the floor and begins the sorting process, she see her name on an envelope in familiar handwriting. It's from San Francisco. She and LB have not been in contact for close to two years at this point, and he does not know where she lives. Thus, he wrote her at her parents' house. Amazing, that this letter arrives at a time when she is at her parents' house but her husband is not. Also amazing: she is the only one present when the mail falls to the floor that day.
Letters are like nicknames. It doesn't matter what the letter says: the important thing is that it was written and mailed at all. The letter could contain statements like, "I'm over you," or, "I never think about you," or, "I don't even know who you are anymore," or, "I'm guessing you're married by now and could care less about hearing from me," and it would be the same as if the writer had written, "I'm still in love with you," over and over again. We don't go through the trouble of writing letters to people who aren't on our minds, and we don't bother renaming people who we don't see as lasting characters in our personal story.
This letter was so full of bluster and huffiness that Jen tells her husband about it on the phone, and offers to read it to him. She doesn't like keeping secrets, and the level of animosity the letter expresses will put the future ex at ease (he's heard enough about that guy from Brown to be wary). Right?
But Jen's husband is no idiot. He says, "I don't need to hear the letter. The important thing is, he's back in our lives again."
* * *
There's a line at the end of When Harry Met Sally where Harry says, "...when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."
Emerson said roughly the same thing about a hundred years earlier: "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."
Thanksgiving, 1992: Jen's divorced, LB and Jen are engaged and he comes to Milwaukee with her, to celebrate the holiday with her family.
They return to San Francisco on the same plane.
The heart wants what the heart wants ;)
Posted by: Miss Susan | January 22, 2012 at 08:43 PM
It's amazing how things work out.
I'm still waiting for my LB...
Posted by: Frogdancer | January 22, 2012 at 11:51 PM
Aww, love this timeline. And I am very glad I asked the question.
Posted by: Amelia | January 23, 2012 at 04:51 AM
Oh this is fascinating. OFD's requirements with the mail pile. That LB was in a fiction program .....can't we please hear more of his letter from late 1991? Maxine just sketched in. The applesauce raisin loaf mention. And the fighting...sigh, so familiar to me. I love this stuff. Oh sorry...this stuff is your life.
Posted by: Hildie | January 23, 2012 at 08:37 AM
And they lived happily ever after.
Hurray for letter writing & persistence!
Posted by: CrazyMomTats! | January 23, 2012 at 08:53 AM
What a great tale! I'm so glad you escaped your ex before it was too late.
Did he have a nickname? "Idiot-breath," perhaps?
Posted by: Barbara | January 23, 2012 at 09:34 AM
Such a lot of commotion and turmoil and angst for the two of you to get together! I think that proves that the two of you NEED to be together. And think of your readers! What would we do with no Olive nor LB nor Sabrina et al in our lives?
This was a wonderful read. Delightful details, as another commenter noted.
Posted by: kmkat | January 23, 2012 at 10:18 AM
L O V E D the timeline. While I knew many of the stories, I didn't know them in order. It's a great love story and has the best ending. Could it be a book? I think so.
Posted by: Annie D. | January 23, 2012 at 03:20 PM
Fruitlessly did I scan this timeline for the pivotal role of Sister Lo, who though purposely Kept in the Dark and some would say Dramatically Misdirected, provided Much Ignored counsel and advice.
Posted by: Lo | January 23, 2012 at 05:02 PM
I loved reading this and the last connected post too. So interesting and really enjoyable to read. Thank goodness you ARE a reader friendly writer! What a silly man he must be. No wonder you felt the need to move on.
Life has mysterious ways of working, doesn't it?
Posted by: Sara | January 24, 2012 at 12:39 PM
I was wondering what Lo would say.
Posted by: Barbara | January 24, 2012 at 12:51 PM
Me too. Next Timeline, please add some Lo stuff.
Posted by: Hildie | January 24, 2012 at 03:05 PM
But how did you KNOW that LB was the man for you?
Posted by: Alice C | January 24, 2012 at 04:58 PM
Nice to read your timeline! Everyone has a story/timeline and it's funny how our stories are all so similar and different at the same time. I've read your timeline snippets over the years but it was easier to put it all together this way. But, what happened between Nov. 1991 and Nov. 1992? Thanks for sharing, Jen.
Posted by: Robin | January 24, 2012 at 07:14 PM
excellente
Posted by: Tamara | January 25, 2012 at 07:58 AM
I llove that quote from When Harry Met Sally. One of my favorites. And why I got married at 21.
Posted by: Em | January 27, 2012 at 07:25 AM