Love is in the air - Delia

In honor of Valentine’s day, I’m going to share with you the romantic story of how I met my spouse.

It was a Sunday evening, the last day of the county fair, and a group of us were going to the demolition derby.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with this form of entertainment, let me fill you in.  A demo derby consists of a bunch of junker cars, driving around in a big, muddy pit, slamming into each other until one by one, the cars die. The last car still moving is the winner.  The mud flies, bumpers fall off and engines start on fire.  It’s the ultimate redneck sporting event.  There were about 6 couples in our group, including my newly married cousin and her spouse, her new sister-in-law and her fiancé (whose bachelor and bachelorette parties we’d all just attended the night before) and my boyfriend and myself.  Also included in the group was the infamous Steve.  I’d never met the guy, but I’d heard plenty about him at the bachelorette party.  The bride-to-be despised him and was sure that he was going to lead her groom into temptation.

There isn’t much talking done during a demo derby, they’re pretty loud, but afterwards, a group of us were standing around the fairgrounds talking.  The infamous Steve was giving us a brief recap of the previous nights’ festivities.  My sister, who’d also been at the fair, joined our group and was also listening in.  It seems, that during their travels the night before, the bachelor party had decided to use Steve’s van as their form of transportation. He was the only one with a vehicle big enough to haul everyone around.  This wasn’t a mini van or even one of those big, eight passenger conversion vans, this was a piece of junk worthy of the demo derby, with a driver’s seat and a single passenger seat, the rear was just a big enclosed metal box, I think they used old blankets to sit on.  Well, their chariot died, the fan belt broke.  Since it was about 1am at the time and they were in the parking lot of a strip club, the odds of getting a new fan belt were pretty slim, so one of the guys undid the leather laces from his shoes and they tied it around where the fan belt was supposed to go.  Yep, the van was literally running on a shoe string.  Steve’s stories got even funnier after that and we were all laughing hysterically.   I remember thinking, boy, he’s a funny guy, but he’d drive me nuts if I ever went out with him.

The next night, my sister and I were at the dinner table telling the rest of the family about the crazy guy we’d met the night before, we were laughing so hard at the memory that we could barely get the story out.

After that, it seemed like everywhere I went, the crazy man was also there, making me laugh every time I saw him with his jokes and stories.  One night, during a conversation, I told him where I lived.  The next afternoon, I was changing the oil in my car, looking oh so glamorous, lying on my back on a creeper, under my rusty old Datsun hatchback, grease gun in my hand and my ponytail dragging in the dirt, when, who comes driving in my driveway, but the crazy man.  After I cleaned the grease out from under my fingernails, we decided to head out to see a movie (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – we’re obviously a very romantic couple).  Instead of the shoe string van, that night he had his convertible. This was one of those special kind of convertibles, the kind with a big hole in the ragtop, making it a 24/7 convertible.  But, no worries he showed me the big sheet of plastic he kept in the back seat that we could hold over our heads in case it rained.  Fortunately for me, it didn’t.

I don’t know if it was the romance of seeing the stars overhead as we drove down the highway, or, like Jessica Rabbit, we were just drawn that way, but it wasn’t long after that, I said goodbye to my boyfriend and road off into the sunset with the crazy man who still makes me laugh.

**sadly enough, his taste in vehicles never got any better.  He currently drives around in a pickup truck with no driver side door handle, a busted heater and a hole in the floorboards (a perfect place to dispose of peanut shells, just drop them on the floor, give them a little nudge with your foot and they hit the road, never to be seen again)

I hope everyone gets to spend their Valentine's day with the love of their lives this year!