I have drawn/written this napkin more times than I can remember. It’s usually one of the first napkins I draw when I meet someone new. It’s very important that they understand how I differentiate
different types of crazy, and which types of crazy I’m very interested in and which ones I could do without.
I was in Greenville, South Carolina not so long ago. I was there for this English teacher conference, which is mostly as fun as it sounds. I presented on day one, and two rows back was this beautiful woman. She was wearing those dark-rimmed MSNBC analyst glasses, and I didn’t know much, but I knew I wanted to talk to her.
She asked a question at the end of the session, and it was answered, and she disappeared. I was not satisfied with that.
Have you ever just needed something? Sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on what it is you’re craving. Do you want pork or beef? Froyo or real ice cream? Real Housewives of Atlanta or New York? (The right answers are: beef, both, neither.)
But sometimes you know exactly what you crave.
The next morning, she came waltzing in to breakfast and I asked her to join me. Something like 25 seconds later I asked her to go to dinner with me that night. There was a big scavenger hunt planned for the conference that evening, but we were not very interested in being around other people, or hunting for scavenge. So we made dinner plans and I snagged her card.
It was at dinner that evening that I explained to her my “theory of crazy.” On the napkin, you can see that there is a fence in the middle of a field that divides the pastures between “Sexy Crazy” and “Scary Crazy.” A closer look will identify the more subtle distinctions of Introverted and Extroverted crazies inside of the bigger Scary and Sexy categories.
When she laughed, she lit up the world. She promised me that she was Sexy Crazy with just enough Scary to keep things interesting. She also spent the next couple of days proving that she was the right amount of both.
I have been writing a lot about older stories found on napkins in the back of an older journal. I wanted to spend a little time tonight writing about where I am now. That weekend in Greenville was the start of something new that just keeps on going, and I wouldn’t change a thing. This blog will be jumping around on my personal timeline a lot, but this is not the last time you’ll be reading about her. Maybe one day I’ll print her name. Maybe not. You should know, though, that I would carve it out of the ocean if I could—so the astronauts could see it from space.
All of those napkins that I’ve written over the years have brought me to all of these napkins that I will be writing for the rest of as long as we are together. But I promise I won’t get hung up on the sap TOO much.
I have to get some sleep now. I’m hitting the road early tomorrow morning.