Tart Tangerine #8

Don Quixote seeks Dulcinea with whom to dream the impossible dream.

I’ll never know why I decided to answer the ad. Maybe it was the romantic imagery. Maybe it was the proper grammar. I’ll never forget how I saw it. My girlfriends and I were reading the personals, laughing about some of the ads we saw. Who would answer some of these? Karen saw it first. She said it was cute. I noted that, depending on how you read it, it might be insulting. After all, while Dulcinea was the perfect woman to Don Quixote, everyone else saw her as Aldonza the whore.

My girlfriends and I laughed and we joked about men trying to sound intelligent by making literary references, but choosing poor material from which to work. Still, something about the ad caught at me. It was simple, yet hopeful, and just a touch whimsical. And the plain Jane inside me luxuriated in the idea that someone might think of me as the ideal woman.

So I dragged my feet when it was time to go. I sipped my coffee slowly and then meandered over to the trash. I asked to keep the section of the paper on the excuse that I wanted to do the crossword. Knowing my love of crosswords, my girlfriends agreed. They wandered off and a few minutes later, I took off as well, paper in hand.

I e-mailed the address listed in the paper – phone numbers are so 1990. I bravely sallied forth with references to windmill giants and chivalry. He wrote back and proposed we meet at the castle. And this being New York, we happened to have one. I was so nervous when I wandered through the park. I had no idea what sort of person I was meeting. I only knew that he liked musical theater and had a romantic side.

We met, and I have to admit, he was more Sancho Panza than Alonso Quijana. But he was as chivalrous as his name sake. He brought me a flower and offered me his arm. We wandered through the park and talked about all the getting to know you things. I told him things even my girlfriends didn’t know – childhood dreams, and modern day fears. At the end of the day, he escorted me to the edge of the park and kissed my hand. From anyone else, it would have seemed cheesy. From him, it seemed appropriate. We promised to see each other again, and we did.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of our first date. We’ve been together seven years, married for five of them. In that time, we’ve fought to right the un-right-able wrongs, we’ve run where the brave dare not go, we’ve helped each other to try when our arms are too weary and stretched out to reach the unreachable star. And every day, we continue to dream the impossible dream.