She's The One

Miguel is just under 6'4"

 When he was growing up we always told our son Miguel to not even consider getting married until he was 30 years old. You don’t know who you are until you’re 30, we told him. We also told him, every night as we tucked him into bed, that he should always know that he was having a very wonderful childhood. This second bit was something I learned from a book by Steve Allen in which he writes that to grow healthy children he assured his little ones each and every day that they were having happy childhoods. So it must have worked, because Miguel is a nice, cheery man—a few years past 30, and still unmarried!
    Miguel is a serial monogamist. He has had several girl friends for several long times. (Of course I’m sure there have been many mini-romances, too, but those are rights of passage events, social exercises, way outside the scope of what I need to know.)

Still life: Good Genes with Bananas

    I have always been intensely interested in knowing the girls who’ve captured his heart, the potential mothers of my grandchildren, and usually have found them to be every bit as charming as he thinks they are. But my intense curiosity is not always a good thing. When he moved in with his first girlfriend, I asked her, over dinner one night, if she took birth control pills. My son was mortified. Not her. “Absolutely,” she answered, smiling sweetly.
    My great faux pas with his last girlfriend was asking her how much she weighed. This came up innocently enough. We were talking high school sports. I thought to myself, as we were talking, that she appeared to be the same size as I when I was consumed with playing field hockey. There, across the table, sat Little Me!
    “How much do you weigh?” I asked, excited.
    Silence. The great silence of the deeply offended.

Key West's Best Key Lime Pie  (Mine)

    The next day Miguel said, “I can’t believe you asked her how much she weighs. She hates talking about her weight.”
    That lady, and her secrets, is now history.
    Now there is Mia. She’s been in the picture for many months now, and I’ve been madly curious about her.
    “Don’t worry,” Miguel told me. “Mia is going to be around for a long time.”
    Yesterday, as we were preparing for a visit from Miguel and Mia, I told my wise stepdaughter Laura that I was nervous, afraid I’d talk too much, say something totally ridiculous like, “How tall are you anyway?” (Which, in fact, I did.)
    And Laura, who is lovely, wrote: “You have nothing to be nervous about. She'll think she's hit the jackpot of potential future mother-in-laws when she gets to know you. And I'm not just saying that because I've had your to-die-for shrimp scampi before.”

Father and son songwriters in Paradise

    I made the shrimp scampi, and garlic bread, and key lime pie with fresh whipped cream. They loved it all! As we were enjoying the fabulously greasy garlic bread I told Mia that when Dolly Parton was asked to choose a food she could eat exclusively for the rest of her life she answered: “fried dough.” 
    “Good answer,” Mia said, and right at that instant, there was a tiny click in my heart and I knew we two had bonded as only two bread & butter-loving blonds can. 
    Mia entertained us with stories of her father’s health food store in Maine, where she began working at the age of 8. She said she eats only white bread today, rebelling against the coarse, multigrained barely chewable stuff she ate as a child. Her family also ate many meals of unadorned tofu, because that was good for them, too.
    Before they left last night I told Mia I had to take photos of her and Miguel for our daughters, and for the people who read my blog. She cheerfully posed for my camera. At one point, while I was trying to make the camera work and maybe she thought no one was looking, she touched Miguel’s face tenderly and murmured “Your skin is so perfect! Good genes!”
    Oh yeah. She’s The One.