Chapter 3

Jazz
If you didn’t hit it off when you met, but years later find that flirting with him is entertaining, the idea of dating each other may be too logical and therefore doomed to be overshadowed by other interests on both sides.

The day I met Jazz I wouldn’t have thought twice about him except for the fact that he was 6’7” with a long ponytail of red hair. He was best friends with my best friend from college (Laura) and he came by the dorms to drop something off for her. I went with Laura to meet him at the front of the building, and I don’t think I saw him again until our senior year when they worked together. Even then, I would come to see Laura and only minimally chat with him, who had since chopped off the ponytail.

The fall after graduating from college, while I was living in Florida as a Nanny, one of our friends got married in our college town. I flew out for the long weekend and was accepted as an honorary wedding party member with Laura playing maid of honor. And somehow, since Jazz and I were both going to the wedding, Laura and the bride decided that Jazz would be my date. This casual declaration ignited both excitement and embarrassment inside of me.

The day of the wedding came and I had become the assistant to the wedding coordinator, another college friend of ours. This kept me busier than a guest or the date of a guest would have been. Upon Jazz’s arrival, I could only afford a rushed hello, and completely forgot to ask him to save me a seat. Consequently, we didn’t even sit together until the reception, during which I was still at least partially occupied with wedding duties. He was quiet but social and appeared to fit in at our table filled with my college floormates.

When the wedding festivities came to a close, Jazz headed off to work and Laura, the wedding coordinator, and I were primarily responsible for the clean up. This task seemed to take an eternity and as we neared the end, my already sleep-deprived state was beginning to slip into a highly distractible daze. The only cure for this is sleep, but while I had so little time to spend with friends that trip, I refused the remedy and instead chose to have dinner at Denny’s with two of my favorite people, Laura and Julia. As a rule, we always went to IHOP for breakfast or lunch, but dinner and late night eating belonged to Denny’s.

Denny’s was followed by a trip to Laura’s apartment where I was to spend the rest of the weekend. By this time, the subject of Jazz and I as a couple had come up at least once. He was a lot of fun and in general just a great guy. Though somewhat awkward beyond issues that came with his height, he was comfortable with himself and I found that attractive and endearing. Laura, who knew him the best, seemed tentative yet encouraging on the matter, which gave me justification to continued to entertain my feelings.

Seeking additional entertainment beyond our sleep-deprived selves, Laura, Julia, and I headed over to Jazz’s work knowing that he would have little to occupy himself during the last hour or two of his shift. Immediately upon our invasion, we discussed possible activities to occupy our foursome for the evening. As we loitered near Jazz, pondering such things as movie showings, I attempted to appear appealing to Jazz by striving to seem as relaxed and fun as possible. I even went so far as to respond to Jazz with a flirty comeback, careful to evade his discovery of how truly monumental that was for me.

Eventually, after doing who knows what to pass the time, the four of us headed off to Denny’s without Jazz’s knowledge that we had eaten there just five hours earlier. As Jazz settled into the booth next to me, I couldn’t help feeling energized. However, the false energy soon faded and I dissolved into a sleepy yet contented mess who just couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed at Jazz’s many amusing comments, and at what he might be thinking as Laura and Julia re-counted to him my strange and memorable behaviors from the day.

At some point the discussion turned to my name and the unique situations it had brought to me. This time it was his turn to laugh at the thought that I was put in a boys cabin at camp one year and boys PE in sixth grade, among other things. But soon, he was telling me how much he genuinely liked my name and had thought of naming his daughter Michael (or another “boy name”) someday. Of course, I was extremely flattered by this as I continued to drift in and out of my sleepy haze.

The next day just before boarding the plane, I created a playlist of songs that made me think of Jazz with which I consoled myself on the journey back to Florida. I also found it soothing to listen to a lively jazz station on the aircraft radio. It had bothered me for some time that the only music I sought to purchase and enjoy was radio pop, country, or anything else with words. I longed to enrich my musical repertoire and decided on that very flight that jazz was where I should start.

I called Laura as I waited for my luggage in Florida to let her know I had made it safely and she had some interesting news for me. She had brought up my name with Jazz and found that he was also interested in me. I couldn’t hide my shock and excitement. This was the first real potential relationship I had had since I had broken up with my boyfriend well over a year before that.

I wasn’t left to obsess over my playlist for long before Jazz created a MySpace account and immediately began messaging with me. I greatly appreciated this gesture of his to pursue more contact with me though I was on the opposite side of the country. I brought up the subject of our interest in one another because I couldn’t stand the fact that he knew that I knew that he liked me and I knew that he knew that I like him without us actually talking about it. And it felt safe because we all knew, so I went for the blunt approach.

I think he was a little surprised, but he responded very positively and over the next two weeks more than 30 e-mails were exchanged between us. More than once we wrote four e-mails in a single day. Our e-mails covered topics such as: what Jazz CD’s I should listen to first, our individual holiday plans, my activities with the kids I was taking care of, his long work hours, what Mac computer I should buy, what color car he should buy, family and siblings, our own self-analysis and musings about personality traits, etc.

After two weeks of constant e-mailing, we were far from bored with one another. The issue was that we had both found other things that were pulling for our attention. On my side, it was another guy in Florida who had captured my heart. For Jazz, he was on a dating website and found himself also romantically interested in a couple girls he had met. After another blunt set of e-mails communicating on this matter with Jazz, we continued to e-mail regularly for several months. Maybe things would have played out differently if we had been able to spend face to face time together, but we’ll never know.

Now
Jazz is married to a girl he met through the dating website. When Jazz started dating his now wife, Laura swore that she looked too much like me and she found it a little creepy. Neither Laura nor I have heard from Jazz in quite a while.