Happy Birthday to my dear and lovely sister-in-law!
Jim and Denise met In a bar or a beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as per the law of beautiful people, but he introduced me to her after he’d moved to Washington. She’d drive up for weekends from her Air Force posting in Norfolk Virginia, between her ICU nursing shifts. I don’t think I can describe what a perfect couple they were (and still are). I don’t just mean in the wonderful, permanent, eternal loving partnership meaning of perfect. That was inspiring then and still. I mean in the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie so beautiful the rest of us needn’t bother, meaning of perfect. She, like Jim, was fit and active and gorgeous, confident and successful. It was intimidating as hell. She still has the best abs in the family.
One night Jenn Goetz and I went out to dinner with Jim and Denise to one of their favorites: the wonderful Fascia Luna pizzeria. Denise drove. As Jen and I unfolded from the back of Denise’s red BMW convertible, we watched tiny Denise in her high heels cross the street beside starched, rail-straight Jim, and we looked at each other. One of us mumbled to the other, “Here we go. Barbie, Ken and their mutant siblings.” The wine at the restaurant was not ruined by my sour grapes.
One of my favorite sounds in the world is of Denise laughing. Specifically, it’s of Denise laughing at my dad. If you don’t already know this, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that my family is the kind of family that plays Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, or other party games when we get together for holidays. Any game like Balderdash or Scattergories, or even a tight game of Boggle, brings out the snake-oil salesman in almost every member of my family.
My father is a wonderful mix of good and bad at this. He’s quite skilled at coming up with things that might be plausible, but he has no poker face. He inevitably breaks up midway through, and for some reason that just lights a fuse for Denise’s laughter. I have watched my father descend into giggles as he attempts to convince a room full of people that Legos are a type of vegetable or that a hippopotamus could win a gymnastics competition. You have not lived until you have watched Denise cackle-gasp at some piece of bullshit my father can not sell without cracking.