This is not a story of love at first sight. Before the love came the oblivion, disgust, indifference, and acceptance.
But before I tell you about that evolution, I will start with the one about your father. You see, he was not always the dapper and handsome man that stands before you today. When I first got to know him after he transferred to the East School in the sixth grade from St. Peter’s in Torrington, he was a pudgy little boy with an acute case of near-sightedness and astigmatism. As a result, he wore a pair of glasses so thick they magnified his eyes so that they looked like they were staring at the world from outside a fishbowl.
I wish I could say that even at the ripe old age of eleven I was compassionate and accepting of people and all their differences, but these ethics didn’t come to me until many years later. It was far more fun, I decided, to torture him. In 1985, the most popular video on television was Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” which starred a geeky glasses-clad character named “Waldo.” In the beginning of the video, Waldo’s mother tried to persuade him to get on the school bus, where the kids were yelling and throwing things out the window. “Now Waldo, I hope you make some friends this year,” she cooed while plastering down his hair down with a wet fingertip. “Aw, Mom, you know I’m not like the other guys,” Waldo argued. “I’m nervous and my socks are too loose.” When he finally mustered the courage to enter the bus, the bus driver/ lead singer, David Lee Roth, greeted him with the famous line, “Sit down, Waldo!” and Eddie Van Halen’s guitar erupted into the song.
There you had it. I had my anthem. I don’t know how many times your dad had to hear this opening dialogue, but I probably recited it to him on a daily basis. “Hi, Waldo!” I would yell when he got on the bus after it made its round from my home on Birchwood Drive to his house on Silbro, two blocks away. “Sit down, Waldo!” “Hey, Waldo, what are you so nervous about?”
He would push up his glasses and stare that magnified stare. “Shut up, Mary Poppins!” he would counter, the fog from his lenses no veil for his contempt.
“Yeah, shut up, Muckins!” Brian would add, proud of the acquisition of his new vocabulary word that year, muck. “Get out of here, Mary Poopins!” chimed in Tai, your father’s best friend, neighbor, and accomplice while growing up.
Of course, my neighborhood girls would join in on the battle. “Hey, Waldo, pull up your socks!” countered Terry, Dawn and Antonella. And the battle between the neighborhoods raged on, girls against the boys.
When we got to school, I drew a picture of the character, glasses, cowlicks, and socks bunched up around his ankles, and handed it to our teacher, Mr. Connel. Amused by the caricature and oblivious to its malicious implications, Mr. Connel hung it on our classroom wall. I shot a victorious smile at your father. “Poopins,” he mouthed across the room.
Shortly after, there was phone call at my house from a Torrington salon, inquiring why I was twenty minutes late for my perm. I’m not sure if those six pizzas were ever delivered to Silbro Drive that following weekend. And until the end of our days at East School, I still can’t say whether it was the boys or the girls who won.
In middle school, there was no high road, no truce, no white flag. With the infiltration of kids the same age coming together from all of Torrington’s neighborhoods, the war between the East end boys and girls fizzled out and became forgotten. Now, classes were split based on ability levels, and my honors classes had no place for your father, who was too busy establishing himself as class clown to be interested in academics. While he was a prominent presence at Vogel Junior High School, popular with the kids and notorious with the teachers, I mostly stayed to myself, quiet with a few good friends, the same girls I call my best friends more than twenty years later. During those two years, your father and I forgot about each other’s existence, passing each other by between classes, the hallways a sea of crowded, booming, busy adolescence.
The summer after eighth grade was when your Uncle Rob died and your dad’s world fell apart. Grandma and Grandpa Lariviere enrolled him in the St. Thomas Moore School in Colchester. When I began my freshman year at Torrington High School, I didn’t even notice he wasn’t there.
Then the new guy arrived at THS in the beginning of our sophomore year. I was awestruck at this newcomer, with his long hair, trademark leather vest and huge, bright blue eyes that melted every girl in their shoes from the classes of ’89 through ’92. Except, as I was soon to discover, this was no newcomer. It was your father, minus the baby fat and glasses. I nearly choked.
Still, throughout those three years we traversed the same high school, we never acknowledged each other. I was caught up in deciding I was finished with my good-girl image, and I strived to be part of a crowd that was more rebellious. They took me under their leather-fringed wings, touting me as their token preppy friend, whisking me off to the bathroom and under the stairways to gossip about other girls and talk about all the boys we liked. I’m not sure how many classes I missed inhaling their second-hand cigarette smoke while teasing my hair to new heights in smoky bathroom mirrors and listening to the tales of all their weekend parties and exploits.
Doug’s high school yearbook picture, 1991
…and mine
Many of my friends had crushes on your father, and senior year, he was voted “cutest boy” in our yearbook. But he didn’t seem interested in girls at the time. He was too busy running amuck in the hallways, stirring up chaos in his classes, and planning the next party with his friends. Meanwhile, I kept getting more and more lost, the honors classes in my schedule morphing into “Criminal Justice and Law,” “Career Foods,” “Senior Problems,” and every other class geared for burnouts and the academically challenged.
After graduation, I decided to change my tune while attending the Torrington branch of the University of Connecticut. I knew I wanted to get into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a serious overhaul of my grade point average was in order. Once I was accepted into the University and was home for the summer, I ran into your father at the East Side Cafe, a Torrington bar on top of New Harwinton Road. I don’t remember how we started talking, but we shared tales about my college experience, and he his military tales from his basic training in Fort Leonardwood, Missouri, to his year-and-a-half-long stint as an Army combat engineer at Fort Benning, Georgia. That summer, he was preparing to fly off to Korea for a year. By the end of the night, somehow it came to be that I was his ride home, and I remember him leaning over from the passenger seat and planting a kiss square on the lips as we said good-bye.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Well, see ya!” He gave me his beeper number, and he was off. Although I kept it, I never used it.
Fort Benning, Georgia
I didn’t see him again until nearly a decade later, in our late twenties, in the same bar. By that time, I was coming out of a bad break-up and decided I was all done with guys and the dating scene. This was the first thing I shared with him when he offered to buy me a drink, just in case he had any ideas. We exchanged a few more words of small talk, mostly about his completion of the police academy and new job as a Hartford police officer. And then, once again, we went our separate ways.
A few months later, I was watching the news from my thirty-four-inch TV screen in my apartment in Vernon, which was right down the street from my job teaching English at Vernon Center Middle School. “A Harford police officer is critically injured after he was stabbed in the neck by a Hartford man,” the newscaster reported. “Twenty-nine-year-old Officer Douglas LaRiviere remains in the intensive care unit. We are awaiting news of his recovery.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat while listening to the details of this attack, where a nineteen-year-old man named Sonny Flowers stabbed and critically wounded his two-year-old daughter, girlfriend, and then your father, who’d appeared on the scene with no backup to respond to a 911 call. How could it be? I had just seen him a few months ago.
Should I go to the hospital to visit? I asked your Grandma Petrovits. Absolutely not, she coached. You don’t know him well enough, and he might have a jealous girlfriend. Just keep him in your prayers.
At the end of that school year, I decided I was lonely east of the river when all my family and friends lived more than an hour away. After working in Coventry and Vernon for four years, I still hadn’t established any meaningful relationships or contacts, and I longed to go back home.
During this time, Jorge, my friend Kara’s husband at the time, decided he was going to fix me up with a state cop named Tim. Tim and I went out a couple times, and he called me when he felt like it. One week I’d hear from him, and the next, he’d disappear. For some reason, Jorge shared his vision for this new couple over a beer with your father, who he stumbled upon at a bar.
“Don’t set her up with Tim,” your dad chastised him. “Set her up with me!”
Jorge told him he’d have to discuss it with me before handing over my phone number. When he did, I was a bit caught up with my sympathy over your dad’s ordeal and with his day in the limelight. Your father was a hero, and I had to admire him for surviving such an attack. “Doug Lariviere asked you for my phone number and you didn’t give it to him?” I admonished Jorge. “What’s wrong with you?”
Days later, Tim started calling me with a vengeance. All of a sudden, he wanted to book my calendar for the next three weeks. I called Jorge.
“Maybe you should hold off on giving Doug my number,” I wavered, figuring I should wait to see how things turned out with Tim, and not wanting to make my life more complicated than it was.
“It’s too late,” Jorge said. “He already has it.”
When he called, our conversation was light and cordial. I offered my sympathies for having to endure such a traumatic experience. I told him I had just been hired at the Naylor School in Hartford, so we would be working in the same city. He assured me my school was located in one of the city’s few safe neighborhoods. I decided I would go on one date with him. It wasn’t likely to go anywhere, it was dating practice, and it wouldn’t hurt to catch up and talk about the old times.
Our first date took place at the Hilltop Inn, which is now the First National Bank on East Main Street in Torrington. I can’t remember much except that our conversation was fun, he made me laugh, and I felt very much at ease. I remember our second date, where he made me dinner at his house in Winsted. I was greeted at the door by the ferocious barking of Daisy and her canine companion at the time, Tyler the Rotweiller. (Tyler was always your dad’s favorite name.) He gave me a detailed account of everything that happened to him on that day he jokingly referred to as his “bad hair day at work.” Near the end of the evening, we sat on the swinging bench on the side of his property and he shyly gave me that line about how beautiful I’d gotten over the years. I weakened.
Me and Tyler the Dog. Your first dog, Daisy, is in the background.
The following year was a whirlwind. Four months after those first dates in August 2002, we were engaged. Four months after that, we bought our home in Simsbury. And four months later, on August 8, 2003, we were married.
This snapshot was taken by Doug’s future Best Man, Pat, moments after I said “yes.”
Because we’d gotten married so quickly, we decided it was wise to wait at least three years before having kids. During this time, we kept getting to know each other. Even after our relationship lost its newness, I never really got over the irony that I grew up and married “Waldo.” I would cling to him from the back of his motorcycle, “Hot for Teacher” blasting on his MP3 player, and think with wonder about how times have changed.
Biker days
One year, we spent my winter break from school at Grandma and Grandpa Lariviere’s Florida home in MarcoIsland. I was thumbing through some of their old photo albums, eager for a glimpse of your father’s past life before I became a part of it. To my surprise, I stumbled upon a picture of my kindergarten class from 1978. What was my mother-in-law doing with my kindergarten picture? was the question in my head—until I scanned the rest of the class and saw him. There was your dad, a miniature version of the geeky kid in glasses I remembered from so long ago. We were standing two polar opposite ends away from each other, he furthest to the left in the back row and me, furthest to the right in the front row. Apparently, he was enrolled at the East School for two years prior to his transfer into St. Peter’s, and we’d napped on our mats, learned about the dinosaurs and snacked on Fig Newtons and peanut butter crackers side by side each day without being aware of it.
Excitedly, we compared kindergarten memories, and the one project we could both remember was our blue hand plasters. After returning from our vacation, a thorough search was conducted in our parents’ attics. Both plasters were recovered, mine faded, cracked, and less preserved than your father’s. We hung them together on the wall of our basement, right near our kindergarten class picture.
Each time I see those plasters and that picture, I decide some cosmic force had its hand in bringing us together. First we crossed paths in kindergarten, then more than five years later in the sixth grade, then almost a decade later while I was home from college, and then another decade again after that. Over a twenty-five-span, we kept encountering each other, slipping in and out of each other’s lives with no idea that they would someday merge together.
Sometimes it’s not easy being married to your father. He drives me crazy with his temper, moodiness, and impatience, and he can still be a bit reckless with his constant search for an adrenalin rush. He has scars from his near-death experience in the HPD that extend down both sides of his throat, and they’ve made their way inside his heart as well, making him bitter and at times, intolerant of the world around him.
But then there’s the other side, the one that leaves me little love notes around the house, nicknames me “Shure” (because, as he explained, I make him feel sure), writes me sweet poetry and handcrafts little cards for me over the holidays, using art supplies during his stint as a school resource officer. He still makes me laugh, reminding me that the world does not have to be such a serious place. He forces me out of my solitude, as without him, I would retreat behind a book or computer and forget to come up for air. He has all the smarts I don’t have, like when it comes to creating and fixing things around the house, finding my way around and, sadly at times, using just plain common sense. He works hard to support his family, even though he’s not happy with the line of work he chose. Underneath his exterior is a kind, gentle and sensitive side that has a profound appreciation for nature and the beautiful things that I often pass with blindfolds on. And most importantly, he loves all three of his children more than anything on this planet.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t still catch myself looking at him, shaking my head in disbelief and asking myself, sometimes out loud, “Why am I making dinner with Doug Lariviere?” “What is Doug Lariviere doing in my wedding picture?” and “Why do I have Doug Lariviere’s baby in my arms?” And his answer is always the same: “Because you’re smart.”
He is right. And that’s the story of how I met your father. While the rest of the world is still asking, “Where’s Waldo,” I, happily, have already found mine.