The hostess and the fella
A Father’s Day tribute
Let me tell y’all a story about a certain fella.
Once upon a time, in 1988, the fella went to a surprise party for a co-worker, and spent most of the evening telling jokes and yuckin’ it up with the hostess.
Every time they left each other to mingle, they somehow ended up beside each other again, and laughed their heads off at obscure things they usually had to explain to other people.
At the end of the night, when the fella took his leave, they hugged at the door. Just a hug. A nice one, though.
The next morning, the hostess’s roommate remarked at how she enjoyed watching the fun she seemed to have with that fella, and the hostess replied that it might be nice to have someone fun like that around, just to go and do stuff with.
The phone rang.
It was the fella.
He had tickets to a play — did she want to go?
Um, yes, she wanted to go to the play very much.
A few days later, he took her out for lunch and, as they went to their cars to head back to work, he mentioned that the dress she was wearing fit her um, quite nicely. Then he gave her a little kiss. Just a peck. But a nice peck.
And just like a cigarette thrown out a car window onto tinder-dry prairie grasses, a wildfire erupted that quite a number of fire-fighting people and negative things failed to extinguish.
The woman was actually annoyed. She wasn’t in the mood for a prairie fire just then. She wanted a buddy. But she kind of went along with it because he was a pretty good buddy. And dang it if there didn’t seem to be potential there for benefits, as well.
The woman had three handsome sons. Boisterous sons, but very good ones. Actually quite stellar human beings, she thought, when they weren’t testing her patience to it’s very LIMIT.
When other fellas asked her out in the past, but backpedalled upon seeing her boys, she gave them the middle finger and tossed her hair, which was actually too short to toss, but the gesture mattered.
The firefighters who knew the fella looked at him with their eyebrows knit together and their extinguishers at the ready. They said ‘she has three kids’ as if he didn’t have EYES and added ‘are you nuts??’
But that fella remained unfazed, embers aglow in his heart, and his fire burned on.
‘I grew up in a house FULL of kids,’ he said, ‘and they have always been my best friends. Kids aren’t bad things. Kids are good things. HERS are awesome and I think they’d look fantastic in little tuxedos.’
So a little while later, the man asked the woman and her boys if they would all marry him. And they did, and they wore tuxedos.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Because the fella and the hostess thought that since kids are so dang fun, they probably should have a couple more; and so they did.
It’s Fathers Day.
And lemme tell ya, no one deserves to be loved and appreciated as much as this funny, hard-working and devoted fella. He’s a Dad cause he wanted to be, and starting out with a ready-made trio didn’t scare him one little bit. Not ONE BIT.
Nowadays, all those wonderful kids (well, four out of five anyway) have created amazingly beautiful grandchildren that come running up the sidewalk as fast as they can, arms open wide, so excited are they to see Grandpa and play in the yard he jazzed up just for them, and drink Shirley Temples mixed by him for them, and go on holidays he planned for them and laugh at his jokes, that other people don’t always get, but THEY do.
And he loves them back so hard that sometimes, when they’re not lookin’, his heart swells up so big it pushes water out of his eyes.
So here we are. Life is good.
It’s also pretty short.
I know you’re going to be shocked to hear that I am the hostess in this story, but SURPRISE! I am.
Happy Fathers Day to my fella.
