12-20-2021
D Vautier
Everybody should fall in love at least twice in a lifetime, I mean hopelessly, shit-face, completely, crazy-like, wild, flaming in love. I mean exactly that kind of love. Nothing less will do--and life is not worth it otherwise.
So I did.
With Cynthia.
In fact I fell in love with her
the very first time I saw her. She
was running across Grady way in Renton to get to work and I was riding
passenger with my boss.
“Who
is that?” I asked.
“Oh
that’s the new girl we just hired in: you’ll meet her.” My boss
replied.
I was working on a WCR (work
control recording) project later when Jamie came up to me and said
“Dominic, this is Cynthia.” And I mumbled something back, “Hi
Cynthia, or is it Cyndy?” She
smiled at me and said “Cyn.” And I went back to my work.
She had one green eye and one blue eye.
That was the beginning.
She always liked to talk to men and as it happened, I always
liked to talk to women and suddenly I liked to talk to her mostly.
She often spoke about her two wonderful kids and her wonderful
husband. As things turned
out he was not so wonderful and she did not have a good relationship
with him at all and was even afraid to leave the kids alone with him.
My relationship with my wife was about the same -- far from good.
In fact my marriage to L had been a total disaster from the very
beginning. I had two
wonderful kids that I absolutely adored but L was intolerable and I
desperately wanted out and I had no idea how to get out.
I was trapped, totally trapped to a life of misery, debt and
loneliness perhaps because of my strong catholic upbringing and all the
guilt baggage in carries. And
I was certainly not about to go around breaking up families.
Then I heard around the office that Cynthia had thrown her
husband out and that presented an incredible opportunity.
So we met in an elevator and I
proposed to her—just like that. “I
want to divorce my wife and marry you.”
She looked at me in
astonishment. “Let me think about this.” She replied.
Meanwhile she invited me over to her place the next Saturday and
I made all the necessary arrangements (ie. got to do some overtime,
etc.) and we had an incredible weekend together.
"Don't you realize the kind of baggage I carry?" she said. "I have two difficult children, I need a psychiatrist once a week and I have to sleep with at least seven pillows. If that's not enough to discourage any man alive then you are nothing less than superman."
I was married to her for 32 years. Then she died.
Franklin Alderman and Dana McLendon developed a chart called the hot crazy matrix (see youtube) . So I decided to spend some time charting my wife Cynthia over 31 years or so. The matrix consists of two axes, the hot axis and the crazy axis. Alderman suggests that you have to plot a woman over several years to obtain a true cluster and there may be outliers. Here is what I came up with.
