Nothing More Than This

Chuck drives to Woodstock and leaves his dog with me for a day while he goes to a doctor’s appointment. This is the redbone coonhound I got for him because he was lonely. Pojd (which is Czech for “come”) is payment for all the good things and all the bad things Chuck has done.

After the appointment Chuck comes back and spends the night. I make that chicken thigh dish we both like (although it means fending off four determined dogs), and we stay up very late. The next day he hangs around until the afternoon; we are having a particularly nice time. Ten minutes after he leaves he’s back, having forgotten something—the tickets to a game. Then he’s off again. Twenty minutes later his car is pulling into my driveway again. What is it this time? I wonder, and decide to open the door saying “What, you came back to ask me to marry you?” which I think is a good joke, but before I can say a word, he flings his arms open and says, “Marry me!”

“Okay,” I say, and I tell him what I had planned to say and we laugh, a little stunned at the coincidence. After he finds his cell phone (between couch cushions) and gets back in his car, he rolls down the window to say, “That was funny, the whole marry me thing, wasn’t it?” and I say, “Yes, yes it was.” We are both, I think, actually happy at this moment. It is nothing more than what it is, two friends who think of the same joke at the same time, but it’s comforting to know that this is what we’ve always done, and all we have to do.