When I met my wife, we were both stationed at Ft. Myer, Virginia. She was a medic and I was a member of the Presidential Saluting Battery. Her barracks were right across the street from mine, and every day after duty hours, I’d run over to the WAC Shack and ask if Specialist Collins was receiving guests.
She’d come bouncing out the double doors and we’d just start down the street with no specific plan in mind. Sometimes we’d go to the 1 2 3 Club on post and have a couple of beers, sometimes to the movies. There was a little hamburger and beer joint just off post. She didn’t eat meat, so I’d order her a hamburger and fries and take the patty off her bun and put it on mine.
A couple of times we went to the Candlelight Inn for a fine dinner, but that was a little pricey. We both loved Mario’s pizza; it was the best ever and everybody knew it. You could go there at ten o’clock at night, two below zero, and there’d be a line half way down the block waiting to place an order.
Now on this particular day, we were walking toward the entry gate to the fort and I had a sudden craving for pizza. “Hey, you want to go to Mario’s?” I asked.
“Oh sure, I’ll marry you,” she answered.
Now I never paid much attention to anything she said, and I followed up with, “What do you want on yours?”
“Oh, I guess some time in June.”
Hell, I thought she said mushrooms. I should have known something was wrong. She’d never ordered mushrooms before, but I was busy calculating the cost. Let’s see now, that’s a buck a slice plus twenty cents extra for mushrooms, and she normally eats two slices… that’s two forty, and if a six pack of beer is four fifty, that’s about seventy five cents a can. If she drinks two beers that’s a buck and a half plus the two forty for the pizza… “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”
I guess it’s my fault for not being a better listener, and looking back on it, I have only myself to blame. But… this whole thing… it was all just a big misunderstanding.
