Before Cyn

07-2022
D. Vautier

Louise was beautiful and I was young and instantly in love.  I don’t refer to the casual kind of love and I always wore my heart on my sleeve anyway.

It was 1968 and I think just about everybody in the world was in love that year.  The Beatles had their white album, the Mamas & Papas were “Dancing in the street” and everybody seemed to be doing pot and getting stoned.  And I was in love for the very first time in my life (except perhaps for Sharon Cronin in the 7^th grade).

To me Louise was an absolute goddess.  She had a figure that was pure Hollywood, the face of an angel, topped with thick black hair and deep rich mellow, brown eyes.  Never mind the fact that she couldn’t get through college, that her father was a total racist, that her mom was way too sweet to raise her well, that she was quick to tears and anger and boredum, that she was domineering, suspicious, possessive and cruel, that she was physically and emotionally abusive, that she had an evil side as clear as a bell.  It didn’t matter to me.  None of this mattered because I was flat-ass hopelessly in love; completely, foolishly, irrevocably, profoundly in love and nothing else in the world could really matter again or bring me to my senses.

I desperately wanted to get on with my wimpy life for I had squandered too many years already (what is it that George Bernard Shaw said “youth is wasted on the young”) and I was determined to not waste any more of my life.  I wanted a family.  I wanted kids.  I wanted somehow, to project an image of my own being forward into the future, to somehow perpetuate myself, to project, because my past was so fragmented, and there was no continuity or structure.  I wanted to desperately establish continuity.

Louise and I were married in June, 1969.  It was a big church wedding.  I suppose some people  need this kind of experience once in a lifetime, because twice is way, way, too much.  We went off on a whirlwind honeymoon to California—such frantic fantastic times, as if we were clutching and straining for every bit of excitement that life could offer—and we did and it did.

My daughter Laura was born in September, 1970.  She was always a dark blonde, a gentle, amiable baby with a whimsical smile and lots of giggles.  As I recall, she was never a particularly hard baby to care for, but as an ambitious young parent, I never really knew the meaning of patience, and for that matter, was never able to spend as much time with her as I needed to.  But then maybe that’s often true of all first time parents, especially ones who came from such a disjointed and raggedy-ass family as mine.

My oldest son David came along soon after, in May of 1972.  He was, I suppose, the perfect child of my dreams, my destiny, my namesake.  I was crazy about the little playful rascal.  And perhaps that’s the reason we are to this day the best of friends, (that is when he’s not out making money and getting rich and doing crazy things).

So these early years 1969-1973 were some of the most pleasurable, and also, some of the saddest too because after 1973 my life turned totally to shit.  While my two kids made me so happy and fulfilled, my wife brought me nothing but deep grief.  Many times I tried to leave her because she was just so abusive to me, and it was in these bittersweet times that I was ripped apart between the bond I had with my kids and the complete distain I felt for her.  In my eyes, she was wicked, and my perception of this was all too evident.  Why would I even attempt to maintain such a destructive relationship?  But she was possessive and she used me and toyed with me and I could not get away.  I was stuck forever to this horrible tar-baby.  I was doomed to a life of complete and utter servitude.

I’m not sure if I ever really believed in love at first sight after that or even the idea of lasting love either, but sometimes I secretly wondered if there is not a special divine plan at work for all of us, the ones who make bad choices early, sort of like one small decision taken from a cheap penny novel, or dime romance story, and that just once in a while it would actually come true.

So it was the spring of 1987 and I had pretty much given up on ever finding this whimsical thing called happiness (what a juvenile notion anyway – happiness, really?), or even any sort of reason or rationale to my own life gone so sour.  I was resigned and finally content to live in my own little petty, furtive, mouse-like world of proverbial “quiet desperation” to which I had become so resigned to, and to some degree, reconciled with.  I was nothing more than a trapped animal, a useless slave to my own religious convictions, my job goals, my cruel, vicious and irrational wife, and my somewhat built-in belief that my family was “the be all and the end all here”.

But then something happened.  I met Cyn.

I never considered myself even able or willing to run around or cheat on Louise.  That was only the stuff of movies, soaps and TV comedies.

My project at Boeing got cancelled.  It was a hopeless and absolutely worthless project anyway and I was glad to see it cancelled, so along with about 50 other people, on the occasion of the Challenger disaster in January, 1986, we were thrown into the excess pile.

So I was immediately reassigned to a new project, one that involved IBM and UNIX platforms.  I loved it and gave it my heart.  One day as I was feverously working on a new module, she came by and said “Hi, I’m Cynthia”.  For all I know, she was probably more impressed with me, the crazy Frenchman, than I with her, but not so.  Somehow I clearly remember the moment, and I’m not sure but at that time I did really and truly fall in love again.

The next day I was returning from a meeting along Grady Way, and a saw this woman dart across the street and into the old IBM building where we were located.  It was her again, that woman.  She was wearing loose filling shirt and white pants.  What is happening to me?

If you want to see somebody who’s truly smart, it’s Cyn.  Cyn was one of these classic 4.0 people, a real bookworm.  She went through pre-med; she went through law school—now that’s what I call being smart.  I’m lucky to have her.  (Actually one of the secrets to a successful relationship is to marry somebody smarter than you, and then just fake it from then on).