There used to be a discount chain called "Danner's". I think it was "Danner's Discount Department Stores"; they had a logo of three overlapping "D"s.

I was in an outlying section of the county, and I can't remember why, but I happened upon this store. I'd never seen one in Ohio before, although I had in Indiana. They had shoddy merchandise and dirty, run-down stores that were never too spiffy when they were new, but their prices were fairly good, so if you were careful in your shopping....

My philosophy has always been that "good enough" is good enough, unless it was a luxury item; a luxury item ought to be luxurious. And my idea of a luxury item was different than other people's. One doesn't use much pepper over the course of a year, but it makes a big difference in taste, whether you have rich and fragrant pepper, or a can full of dust, so I always bought the very best, the freshest, when it came to buying spices. Garbage bags, on the other hand, typically got discarded when they were half-full, so I buy the cheapest bags I can find.

I went down to St. James Infirmary
To see my baby there,
She was lyin' on a long white table,
So sweet, so cool, so fair.

Went up to see the doctor,
"She's very low," he said;
Went back to see my baby
Good God! She's lying there dead.

I Needed Sheets

I'd moved to town with little more than what would fit in the back seat and trunk of an old Catalina. When I was in town a month, I bought a piano, a new one, and it was an Everett studio piano, which is not a cheap brand. It took me six months to acquire a bed, and I was now at the 6.5 month point. I had moved my sleeping bag from the floor to the bed, and now I was wealthy enough to outfit my bed with sheets and blankets.

So I was wandering around the housewares department of Danners when I saw her. She was sitting on the floor, arranging a display of throw pillows. She had long curly red hair, and was plumby. You just knew that she'd spend the rest of her life fighting to keep off the excess pounds. And she had lots of freckles. One doesn't resist flirting with a pretty girl like that.

It Won't Help

"It won't help," I said. She looked up at me, and said, "Huh?"

"It won't help," I said, "to pray to the God of Throw Pillows. It's Thursday night, and on Thursday nights, that's his bowling league."

She almost gagged, as she started to laugh. The God of Throw Pillows? I thought she was praying? On Thursday nights, the god went bowling? I think it was the bowling league comment that burst the camel's back. She raised her hand coyly, to cover her mouth, but her smile broke through between her fingers anyway; it must have been at least 600 watts.

I went down to old Joe's barroom,
On the corner by the square
They were serving the drinks as usual,
And the usual crowd was there.

On my left stood old Joe McKennedy,
And his eyes were bloodshot red;
He turned to the crowd around him,
These are the words he said:

I Was Hooked

A woman who laughs at my jokes is irresistable. She had a pretty face besides, and as I mentioned before, her body had enough curves to meet the quota for three women. It was the smile, though, that hooked me. It's always the smile that hooks me.

I walked up closer, to talk to her. Then I noticed her hand. "Oh," I said. "You have a ring on your finger. Relationships are hard enough to put together; it's a wretch that would do anything to screw one up."

Yes, I actually said wretch. She didn't laugh at that. That was a good sign, but it didn't matter, since she was taken. "Oh this," she said, twisting her engagement ring. "You think it's an engagement ring." Well, actually, it didn't look like one, but it was on that finger. "It's not. This was my grandmother's ring, and it doesn't fit right on any of my other fingers."

So That Means

So you're not taken? She blushed, and looked down. Well, she said, there's this fellow, and we sorta have an understanding that we're going to get pre-engaged a year from now.

So a year from now, you're going to be pre-engaged to become engaged at a later date, at which point you will have decided to eventually marry? So is that sorta like going steady or something like that? Well, no, she said. He's not living in town any more, so I only see him every three or four months, so we both date other people.

The Lucy Meter

I won't say it was the screwiest thing I ever heard, but it definitely ranked pretty high on the You Got Some Splainin' To Do, Lucy meter. If a guy told that story, they'd give him a 72-hour vacation in a nearby hospital, to decide if he was a danger to himself or others. When a woman with curly red hair tells it, it's just another redhead.

And you know that joke about the "mating call of a blonde," right? It goes, "I am so drunk." Well, the mating call of a redhead is supposedly "Next!" I definitely wanted to see how committed this redhead was to being committed to being committed to being committed to making a lifetime commitment. Or whatever.

Let her go, let her go, God bless her;
Wherever she may be
She may search the wide world over
And never find a better man than me

Oh, when I die, please bury me
In my ten dollar Stetson hat;
Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So my friends'll know I died standin' pat.

Those Sheets

Funny thing was, I walked out of the store without buying any sheets. The first rule of salesmanship is once you've made the sale, shut your yap, and leave. So having made a date to take her out for supper and a movie in another two days, I left, even though I didn't have any dry goods selected. I didn't want her getting cold feet and changing her mind. I could always buy sheets at Odd Lots/Big Lots, after all.

But when I picked her up on Saturday night, she wasn't reluctant at all. She was living with her folks, so I met her father, who acted like I was an OK guy. Maybe it was because he didn't want his daughter to marry this other guy without having shopped around. Or maybe it was because I acted like an OK guy. Her dad was certainly nice. He told me what he did, I asked some questions, and it would have been an interesting evening if Debbie had never come downstairs, and I'd had a two-hour conversation with her dad.

But she was dressed up like something out of the 1950s. She had a bulky green pullover sweater that was really fuzzy, and a plaid skirt, white anklets, and black patent leather shoes. My ankles seemed to buckle on me, and to tell you the truth, I think her dad thought she was a real looker, the way she was dressed, too.

Do They Reflect Up?

So I held the car door open for her, allowed her to sit, and closed it, then went over to the driver's side. As I pulled away, I asked her, "So, do they reflect up?" I thought a joke was the thing at that point.

She giggled. "I don't know. DO they? What color are my panties? Or am I wearing panties?"

I suspect I blushed at that point. "Uh, black?" She said, "No. They're pink." And on our first date, at the start of our first date, with someone she'd met only two days before, that she'd talked with for only a few minutes, she said, "See?" And she pulled up her skirt to show me her panties.

Get six gamblers to carry my coffin
Six chorus girls to sing me a song
Put a twenty-piece jazz band on my tail gate
To raise Hell as we go along

Now that's the end of my story
Let's have another round of booze
And if anyone should ask you just tell them
I've got the St. James Infirmary blues

Nice Gams

I'm sure I blushed at THAT point. And really, there was no real reason to blush. I hadn't seen anything that I wouldn't have seen if we'd met at a swimming pool. But it startled me enough that I almost wrecked the car.

She laughed her head off. We went to a burger joint and had a nice supper. We went to a movie that wasn't very scarey, but a couple of times, she grabbed my arm, as if she was scared, pressing her chest into my arm.

Afterwards, we just drove around a bit, talking. She asked how I happened to be in Danner's, and I said I just got a bed, and I needed to buy some sheets. She wanted to know if I bought white sheets, solid color sheets, or something with a pattern. Nothing at all, so far, I said. I was still using a sleeping bag; I had a garage-sale dinette set, a piano, and was just in the process of getting a bed set up.

You Play Piano

"You play piano?" she gushed. "What kind of music do you play?" I told her that I played a few hymns, that I had a few rock music songbooks, and a couple of really fat fakebooks. She didn't know what a fakebook was - it's a book showing melody, chords and words, that professional musicians get, so that they can play requests of songs they can't remember. She wanted to hear me play.

I can't recommend anything out of a hymnal as being very romantic, but I played "Be Still My Soul." She'd never heard it before; it's mostly a Methodist song, and she was a Catholic. Then I got out a book of Billy Joel, and really screwed up "Piano Man". To be honest, I'd have been terrible if it had been just instrumental, but I sang along, and I'm not a very good singer. Then I got out the fakebook, and played "St. James' Infirmary". She'd never heard it before; if there's a drearier, sadder song ever written, I'm not sure what it would be.

But You Know

But you know, if you really want to romance a girl, and she's not interested, you can do nothing right, and if she wants to be romanced, anything you do will be right. "You said something about maybe having some coffee?" She decided to go into the galley and brew a pot of coffee, while I played the piano some more. The pressure was off, and I actually did a half-way decent job on some songs that she'd actually heard before.

Then she joined me on the piano bench, handing me a cup of coffee and keeping one for herself. She decided to play "Chopsticks", and then decided that I should play with my left hand, her with her right, with my right arm around her waist. It might have been hysterically funny, our uncoordinated playing, had we been drunk, but we just laughed. She skooched her hip more tightly against my hip, and grabbed my right hand with hers, and raised it, plopping it firmly on her breast.

"I wondered," I said, "if you were wearing a bra or not." She said that her dad probably wondered, too. He'll be expecting us back, oh, maybe 2 or 3 AM. We were fifteen minutes from her house, and it was barely 11 PM.

Nice Sweater

Nice sweater, I commented. "You don't have anything to compare it to!" she replied, and reached down to her waist and peeled the sweater off. She had many freckles.

"I don't intend to have sex," she said, "until I'm engaged," but her definition of sex apparently was similar to Bill Clinton's. She led me into the bedroom, turned on the television to a black-and-white movie, and we mostly cuddled for the rest of the evening.

I miss Debbie. She was intelligent, and fun, and caring, and honest. Her mom invited me for a meal at least every other week, and I really enjoyed being with her folks. Debbie didn't hesitate to be physically affectionate with me in front of them, hugging me, and patting my butt, although she obviously didn't take off her clothes in front of the three of us at once.

It Was Christmas

It was Christmas time, and I thought it was time to fish or cut bait. I had made up my mind to up the ante; I bought a modest engagement ring, and was going to propose to her. Instead, when I arrived that night, she decided to come out and talk to me on the porch instead of having me come in - and then I saw it. She was already wearing an engagement ring - with a rock that must've been two carats.

I didn't bother pulling out the ring that was in my pocket. One doesn't propose to a girl who's just accepted another guy's proposal.

I made an excuse and left as quickly as possible. I didn't want her to see my tears. It wasn't the first year I'd had a terrible Christmas. I'd once spent about 10 hours on Christmas Eve at a lonely O'Hare terminal, frozen to death, with a case of the flu, sitting on the unpadded marble window sills, waiting for a plane that'd been held up by the weather at Stapleton Field in Denver. Another Christmas, I stayed home alone with a respiratory infection while my family was exchanging presents in the next county over. And a few year later, Em, my late first wife, first came down with the symptoms of SLE, the disease that would eventually kill her, on Christmas.

So I can't say I've ever had any Christmases that ever lived up to the promise. As far as Christmas goes, I've got the St. James Infirmary Blues.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Be Still My Soul - Bill Clinton - Billy Joel - Catalina - chopsticks - Cincinnati - Danner 5 & 10 - engagement ring - fakebook - piano - St. James Infirmary - Systemic Lupus Erythematosis