Twenty

I, I would be king,

And you, you would be queen,

And nothing could drive us away,

We could be heroes, just for one day.

-David Bowie, Heroes

One of the major themes of Scripture is that God takes our mess and makes good things happen.  Genesis by itself has story after story of family dysfunction that somehow God holds together into something like a plan.  The characters of the Bible, from Abraham, to David, to the disciples of Jesus in the New Testament, don't succeed because they are heroes, but because they are God's chosen children.  It's a humbling thing to live under that sort of narrative, where you really can't take much credit for whatever happy ending might come.
Today is the twentieth anniversary of my first date with Michele.  It is a date that she remembers with as much faithfulness as our actual wedding anniversary, but honestly, I'm always a little puzzled as to why.  Our first date was not so great, I mean it wasn't the worst catastrophe ever, no one got hurt or seriously injured, it just wasn't anything like what you see in those romantic movies.  It doesn't really even fit into a romantic comedy, because the mishaps of the evening are not really funny, or even that remarkable.
Michele had worked hard to get me on this date.  Despite her family's old-fashioned griping about how girls shouldn't call boys, and my own self-absorbed, over-worked resistance, she persevered and got me to go to a movie.  I had to work later than I thought and we missed the early show, and so we ended up starting even later than usual.  I did not know that Michele had skipped dinner, and so I suggested that we just go for coffee while we waited for showtime, we drank some big coffeehouse concoctions with way too much sugar and caffeine and got ourselves mildly embarrassed by a sketchy old guy with a guitar who was entertaining at the coffeehouse that evening.  So far so good, but then it was time for the movie.
My choice of film revealed several things about me, none of which is particularly flattering.  First off, I was pretty selfish, second of all, I didn't have any clue about the young lady I was taking on this date, or indeed probably much of a clue about women in general.  My choice was Face Off, starring Nicholas Cage and John Travolta.  It was that brief moment when both of those actors were at the height of their popularity. Travolta was still in his post Pulp Fiction honeymoon with the public and people were discovering that he actually could act in a non-disco, non-talking baby, movie.  Cage was still in the grace period where people thought his portrayal of edgy, borderline personality characters was actually acting.  But for me the real draw was the director John Woo, because in college I had immersed myself rather too deeply in the world of action movies, and had discovered Woo's Asian movies, like The Killer, and Hard Boiled and sort of expected his American debut to be something exceptional, especially given the involvement of big stars like Cage and Travolta.  For those of you unfamiliar with Woo's Hong Kong career, his Asian career featured Chow Yun-fat, who you may know from his role as the King of Siam in latest film rendition of The King and I.  The Killer is an action movie about a hit man that is tense and beautiful, it is violent but in a very artistic, choreographed sort of way, with slow motion sequences that almost certainly inspired the Wachowski effects in The Matrix.  I had high hopes that Woo would bring something new and distinctive to the American Action movie.  He did not.  It was one of my first lessons in the ability of dysfunctional systems to suck every bit of light back into them.
Face Off is not a good film.  It's not even particularly good by action movie standards, it falls far short of Die Hard and wallows somewhere around your basic Jean Claude Van Dam flick. What's more, it made Michele nauseous.  Partly because she was nervous (about little old me?), partly because she hadn't eaten, partly because we just had sugar/caffeine/embarrassment overload in the coffee house, and partly because there is a scene that implies and dimly reflects a guy with all the skin on his head flayed off.  What's troubling about that?
Every year on June 27th, Michele goes through the litany of all the things she could have done differently.  I just have one thing I would have done differently: not been so blindly selfish as to pick a movie that stood virtually no chance of being enjoyable for her, even if she had not started feeling ill.  As it was, we didn't have much in the way of conversation to end the evening, it was mostly just me apologizing for the movie and her seeming very disappointed that the whole thing had gone south.
By the motion of radical grace and probably a considerable amount of stubbornness, we went on a second date, and a third, and a fourth, and so on.  Twenty years, two children and three states later, we still do not like the same movies, but we're still together.
I think about our story as a sort of contrast to the strategies that are most often espoused in dating culture, most of which seem to focus on things in common and trying to make things go swimmingly well.  I think, if anything, our first date probably prepared us for the reality of an actual marriage a lot better than some contrived, flawless evening.  Life is messy and ain't none of us perfect.  We are selfish, and clueless, nervous and easily flustered, but we can still learn to love each other.
I guess at this point, I no longer think about that night and wish I had done anything differently, I understand that whatever it is that we have started growing then.  Maybe it was just the realization that, after that crash and burn, we still actually wanted to pick up and try again.  That is a reality that we have had to live out more times than I care to remember, and we will probably have to keep doing it.
Happy Twentieth First-Date-Aversary Michele.