Just One Look

I’m not a snowbird or a beach girl. I am, to be quite honest, incredibly unathletic when it comes to skates, skateboards, surfboards, skis, and snowboards. (Even bicycles if there are lots of curves and obstacles.) Anything requiring balance, coordination, speed, and confidence is
pretty much not part of my skill set.

Fortunately, my guy, a surfer and owner of a popular surf school on Oahu, likes nerdy book girls who wear glasses.

Most of you know the backstory. But if you’re new in my world this might be news. Ty and I met when I interviewed him for a future book. The book became Flirting with Forty, a 2006 bestseller, that was turned into a 2008 movie for Lifetime starring Heather Locklear.

Ty and I dated long distance for nearly nine years—he in Hawaii and me in Seattle with my children—and we constantly were asked, ‘How does this end?’

It always puzzled me. How does anything end?

One of the things learning to surf—and I still am not good—taught me was that your surfboard will go in the direction you face.

So, if you look down, you’ll fall off. If you look straight ahead, square your shoulders, and keep your gaze on the beach in front of you, your board will straighten out and go in that direction. Where you look is where you’ll go. So choose your focus.

But that’s not just surfing, that’s life. And so when people asked, ‘where will this go? How will it work? What’s going to happen?’, I truthfully answered, “I don’t know but I’m going with it as far as it will go.” Because why watch the scoreboard while you’re playing the game? Focus on the game. Focus on what’s happening right now—not earlier.

Years later, when Ty and I were expecting a baby of our own, people continued the questions, asking if Ty was going to move to Seattle permanently, and I’d say no, because that wasn’t the plan. It would never be the plan. Instead we were just going to keep doing what we were doing, which was being together and then apart, and then together again, and so on.  We always found a way to get back to the other and sometimes we’d have to wait a month but we were patient, and aware that we had limitations due to work and family. So we learned to make it work—for us. Perhaps it wasn’t ideal for others, but this wasn’t about others. It was him and me.

Why did it work? I think its because I chose to make it work. I liked him that much. I loved him that much. Like Kai and Jackie in my book Flirting with Forty, Ty changed my life. He made it magical and exciting. It was like Mama Mia, the ABBA song,

Just one look and I can hear a bell ring
One more look and I forget everything
Mama Mia, here I go again.
My, my how can I resist you?

I couldn’t resist him that first year.  Or the second, or the third year. I was crazy about him, absolutely head over heels, and I’m still crazy about him and we’ve been together 21 years in April..

Ty’s and my relationship was never the one in Flirting with Forty. That was a novel, a fictional creating where I could control the outcome. But he and I have had an even better story…a bigger adventure, a more passionate love story because its not always easy. Life is complicated. We’re both real people, and thus, complicated. But it’s real. I’ll be sixty one in February, and it’s awesome to look back and realize, that life wasn’t over at forty.  Life was just beginning.

Just one look…