The man I just met

The man I just met likes to check the weather. Last Sunday morning, the day of my barbecue, my going away barbecue, he called to say he had bad news. It's gonna rain today. For sure. It seemed there was nothing I could argue there. Well, what's the good news, then? Pause. I had a great time with you last night. Yesterday we were talking on the phone and he checked the weather online for Wednesday, the day I am driving down to my new home. The day I leave for good. Forty percent chance of showers he reads. He can't see me on the other end of the line, nodding my head. Things like checking the weather: these are things I am not very good at.

The man I just met is exactly that: a man I just met. You could call it bad timing since I have met him on the eve of my departure. But you could also call it good timing, because, after all, we did meet and like my therapist would say as far as problems go, it's a good one to have.

There are mountains of things the man I just met doesn't know about me. Like that I hate it when I can't think of anything to say. That I don't care much for eggplant. That there are certain words, I will always mispronounce. But so far, what he does know, he seems to like. He seems to get. He seems to be okay with.

I can't really say much more about it now. All I know is that he is a man I just met. A man who's not afraid to show me his quirks, a man who can't always tell when I am joking, a man who offered to loan me his computer when mine stopped working. All I know is that he is a man who thinks to check the weather, and even, to check it ahead of time. Perhaps it is because he likes the certainty of science or maybe it is because he owns a boat he would like to be sailing, and then again, maybe he likes to plan ahead, as much as one can, for disaster.

But he is a man whom I have seen noticing the patterns of the wind, a man with a pinhole leak in his house that drives him crazy, a man who has stood outside and looked up and convinced me, it wasn't going to rain.