LOVE IS IN THE AIR

Love is in the Air

This year I'm celebrating Valentine's Day by sharing some of my happiest memories of my Sweetie, James Aschbacher. There are so many more to choose from over 40 years, but (right now) these are my Top Ten:
 

MARCH OR DIE  It wasn't even a date. I had only recently met James at the comic book store, and I asked if he wanted to come to a movie I had to review. It was March Or Die, a French Foreign Legion movie (a throwback genre if ever there was one, in the 1970s) starring Gene Hackman as an American soldier-of-fortune off fooling around in the desert. It was largely preposterous, but I was "at work," so we were slogging through. At one point, as the camera panned across the vast, golden desert landscape, three figures in shimmering electric-blue satin, sheiks or Bedouins, or something, appeared on the distant crest of a dune. James and I leaned our heads together and whispered, in unison, "Look, it's the Andrews Sisters!"

Okay, maybe not screamingly funny, but the fact that we made the exact same joke in the exact same instant suddenly felt — momentous.

MY FORMER/FUTURE GIRLFRIEND We were at a comics convention, one of the many we attended in the spring and summer before we got married. We would haul dozens of boxes of comics from Atlantis Fantasyworld to the con in James' gutted Econoline van (two front seats, and absolutely nothing in the back) to sell at our table in the Dealers' Room. During a slow period one day, probably when some popular interview or panel was going on in some other room, James covertly drew my attention to a pretty young woman with long hair strolling past the tables. What he meant to say (I think), was "She looks like my former girlfriend." What came out of his mouth, however, was, "She looks like my future girlfriend." Did I mention we weren't married yet? I suppose there were many snarky, irate, and/or cutting remarks I might have made in response, but I was too busy laughing.

MY WIFE We were prowling through an antique store one day during our 4-day honeymoon in Carmel at the Casa Munras Hotel. We were murmuring together about something, and the friendly clerk over at the desk asked if she could help us with anything. "No thanks," said James, "I was just talking to my wife." My wife. We looked at each other and tried not to giggle.

Into the Night

REDDING We had been at a weekend comic convention in Portland, Oregon. The event closed at 5pm Sunday evening, and since we were packed up by 6, we decided to head out immediately to begin the long drive home. That first night, we stopped in Eugene. The next day we got as far south as Redding before the ferocious midsummer heat (the van didn't have AC) forced us to stop at a motel. Our room was upstairs, with an exterior staircase right outside that led down to the parking lot, with a Denny's or HoJo's, or something, on the other side of the lot.

Our plan was to cool off in the blissfully air-conditioned room, then go down and eat so we could get an early start in the morning. But first, there was that bottle of champagne that we'd lugged upstairs in our cooler. (Don't leave home without it, that was James' motto.) We were watching an old Star Trek rerun on TV and I remember a long discussion about comic artist Steve Leialoha's slender, long-fingered hands; he'd been sitting adjacent to us at the con, sketching for the fans. Between the heat and the bubbly, we found we no longer had the enthusiasm, much less the ability, to navigate those stairs, so we went to bed instead, hoping it wouldn't be too hot to sleep.

In the middle of the night we woke up freezing! The sun was down, the earth had cooled, and our AC unit was still roaring away. James got up to adjust it, but none of the controls worked; either it was busted, or the knobs were merely decorative and the machine was permanently set to 'Arctic.' James even tried beating on it with his shoe. We had to bundle up in the one pair of pajamas we had between us: I wore the shirt, he put on the pants; we felt like Rock Hudson and Doris Day. We ransacked the closet for the one extra blanket we could find and piled all the rest of our summer travel clothes on top of that. Next morning we could not get out of there fast enough!

FAVORITE MOMENT A friend is a music producer with a recording studio in his garage. One night, over dinner, he mentioned that his favorite moment of the morning was when he took his second cup of tea into the studio to go to work. Without missing a beat, James said, "My favorite time of the morning is when my wife comes out of the shower naked and gives me a big kiss."

FUR FOR BREAKFAST  One night in bed, we were discussing upcoming travel plans. (Well, I was; James, a notorious homebody, was expressing dismay.) At one point I said, "You know, some people actually like to travel." To which he retorted, "Well, some people eat fur for breakfast!" There was a beat of stunned silence as our brains digested his words, then we both exploded like Vesuvius — breathless, shrieking, helpless. We laughed until we cried.
 
SO(HO) FUN For awhile, James belonged to a loose collective of local artists calling themselves SoHo Beach who once put together a weekend pop-up art gallery in a Watsonville parking garage. He was off somewhere schmoozing and I was sitting in the booth one day when a beloved local matron of the arts stopped in; she had never seen James' work before, and she couldn't stop smiling and raving about it. Finally she turned to me and said, "Oh, I bet he's so much fun!" "Well, I think so," I agreed. "I married him!"

STARS OVER SWANTON We had lazed poolside all afternoon up Swanton Road with our friends Bruce and Marcia, and Mort and Donna. (Donna and I actually got wet; everybody else kept to the shade, sipping margaritas!) As dusk fell, we all drifted upstairs to the wrap-around patio just outside the kitchen, claimed patio chairs, and gazed out over the green hills and treetops of Swanton to a glimpse of horizon beyond, watching the stars wink to life, one by one, in the vast, darkening sky. No conversation, no one-liners, nobody said anything. Just enjoying a magical moment with people we loved.

THE BUBBLE TEST One day, we set out to buy ourselves the perfect champagne glasses — flutes, of course, narrow enough at the base to keep the bubbles bubbling, and not so wide at the top that the bubbles would dissipate too quickly. But there isn't any way to gauge how bubbles will behave in a glass without taking it on a test drive. And since nothing else bubbles quite like champagne, we brought a well-stoppered bottle along with us to try them out, visiting kitchen stores and housewares departments, pouring little tots of bubbly into prospective glasses to see how they performed. We asked permission first, of course, but not a single sales person objected; they got a lesson in the aerodynamics of sparkling wine, and half an hour of entertainment!
 
LA VIE EN LA MOULIN James and I spent five days alone together at the Moulin, our friends' centuries-old mill house on the Yonne River in the Burgundy region of France. It was an excessively hot June, and we were pretty torporous during the day. But one evening we found an Edith Piaf CD and played it through the open door as we sat out on the back porch overlooking the river. Dark was just beginning to fall around 9 pm, we were sipping champagne (of course!) and I was fooling around with a set of Tarot cards in French we'd found, with Piaf's throaty vibrato carrying splendidly over the water. We noticed an older gentleman had pulled a deck chair out onto his little dock down the river, as the bedazzling stars emerged in the sliver of black night visible between the tree tops. When Piaf concluded her last song, with a rousing flourish, and all was again silent along the river, the man downstream quietly folded up his chair and took himself and his memories back inside.

"Everybody needs his memories," says author Saul Bellow. "They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

Wishing you many happy and significant memories in this season of love.

(Paintings by James Aschbacher, of course!)