I found love when I stopped looking for it

1980

I was coming up on my 30th birthday with no marriage prospects on the horizon. I had just ended a summer romance not by my choice but his.

I commuted by ferry from Hingham to Boston five days a week. One day there was a new ferryboat captain. Be still my heart. I blushed when he caught me staring at him in awe.

He was tall with a slim build and gorgeous hands. Yup I am a hand lover especially when there’s a watch on it. I finally figured out that this was my daddy image.

My own father had manly hands and always wore a wristwatch. This image got stuck in my mind from an early age. That and the smell of Old Spice after shave. I became a dead ringer for manly hands with a wristwatch and the smell of Old Spice.

This summer’s fill-in had two out three prerequisites for a potential date. Not many young men were wearing Old Spice, so I compromised on the smell test.

My new ferry boat captain was a strawberry blonde with a thousand freckles and a tan to die for. The way he pushed back his sunglasses onto his crown of curls sent shivers down my spine. In my eyes he was an Adonis, a man with the confidence to maneuver this very large ferry and also show a softer side when interacting with customers.

The first time I saw him he was standing on the dock ushering people up the gangplank shaking hands with commuters headed for work in the Financial District of Boston.

His mandatory uniform of a white short sleeved shirt with striped gold and navy epaulets at the shoulders melted my heart. I don’t usually succumb so easily to handsome men, but he checked all the boxes.

It was just after the 4th of July 1980. I remember because he sent one of his guys down to give me a small red, white and blue be-ribboned bud vase with a few carnations. It was left over from a July 4th harbor cruise that he had commandeered.

I carried the vase and flowers off the boat trudging it up the cobblestone sidewalk on State Street to One Boston Place where I worked on the fifth floor.

I cleared a corner of my desk for a little shrine of my gift from him. I think the carnations lived for a couple of weeks. Carnations are known to be hearty if not the most beautiful of flowers. There is something to be said for the longevity of the carnation.

The next morning, he called me up to the bridge where he was steering the ferry and gave me a tour of the dashboard populated with buttons and lights aglow. Of course, there was the beautiful mahogany steering wheel front and center in this giant arc of glass that gave the captain a bird’s eye view of outer harbor and beyond to the scattered little islands that dotted our trip into Boston.

I had thanked him for the flowers and asked him how long he would be working in Boston. I discovered that he was from Rhode Island, just an hour south of where I lived in North Weymouth, MA. This gave me a glimmer of hope.

Unfortunately, I was later to discover that he was a tugboat captain in Seattle where he and his long-time girlfriend lived.

He invited me to join him in the cockpit the next Friday night for a booze cruise in Boston Harbor. I was in over my head. I knew that even with a girlfriend, I wouldn’t shut him down if he made a pass at me.

It was Kismet. He introduced me to all the crew that crossed our path and let me ‘drive the boat’. He said I was a natural as he stood behind me with his hands lightly touching my own. It was a case of “You had me at hello.”

There ensued a torrid summer affair that had me blinded to inevitability of it becoming something more. He was upfront with me about his life in Seattle with his girlfriend of four years.

I was playing with fire and yet I still felt our love had the possibility of changing our future. We spent time at my house, five minutes from the Hingham port.

The day arrived when he had to go back to Seattle. The summer was over.

I didn’t realize the capacity that I had for love. I was not one to cry and carry on at the end of a relationship. I was all about moving forward. Why was this one so different? I bawled my eyes out in front of him. He consoled me. He was a real man in my eyes. He didn’t shirk from my emotion and drama. He stayed the course and waited for the storm of my emotion to pass.

After my tugboat captain’s leave, I began to assess my life and what I wanted for myself. I took a whole new tack by concentrating on things I could control like gardening and reading some good fiction. I started taking care of me with no expectations for my future. I was going to live in the now and cherish my friendships and let things fall where they may. Love might not be in the cards for me. It didn’t matter. I wanted to live my life with honesty and integrity.

The one thing that validated me about my tugboat captain was the letter I received in December. In his letter he went on about how he missed me and how he wanted to stay friends with me.

That was the impetus I needed to see with keener eyes, the shortcomings of my captain. I was angry that he thought I would become friends with him. Perhaps he wasn’t the adult I thought he was. All I could think was what about his girlfriend and how many other women he may have done the same thing as with me. This solidified my decision to carry on with my life on my terms. I was at the wheel and would never again be sideswiped by passing men.

1982

I was managing a multi-family housing development in the city of Worcester. It consisted of 17 buildings in the roughest part of the city.

From the beginning, my superintendent had made up his mind he was not going to cooperate with me. We had an adversarial relationship that the Boston office refused to get involved with.

This guy had been around for years moving from site to site with a very entitled attitude because he knew all the bigwigs of the company.

He was undermining my authority and I needed to get him out of there before the morale of the whole staff could be affected.

By a stroke of luck, he was transferred to another site, and I had my chance to start building my team.

First, I made the 24-year-old mechanic, my new maintenance superintendent. The main office balked at my decision and made him meet monthly goals for three months before I could make him the permanent replacement.

I knew he could do the job and ten times better than the super I inherited when I came here. After working closely with him on maintenance issues, he was officially made the superintendent. He proved to everyone that he had the intelligence and maturity for the job despite his youthful appearance.

Over the coming months we decided to walk all the hallways of every building on Friday afternoon. The hallways were occupied by the substance users after dark where they shot up and left dirty needles and lots of urine. You never knew what you might find on these trips. After a while it felt like being on a date. I had so much respect for him and a growing physical attraction. In my mind I couldn’t wrap my head around the age difference. He was seven years younger than me. Had he thought this through in his own mind?

The strangest things started to happen. I like to call them synchronicities, when it seems like the universe is orchestrating these occurrences.

One day at lunch my new super told us a story about his brother who was his ‘Irish twin’ meaning less than a year separated his older brother and himself. He went on to tell us how his Irish Twin was married to a woman seven years older than him. He was not a real talkative guy, so I took what he said to heart. I DID have a crush on him but dismissed it due to our age difference.

He was dating one of our college interns who was much closer to his age. I was happy for them because I knew she came from a wealthy family in Philly. On the other hand, my super was one of seven boys whose father died when he was six years old. What a storybook ending it would be for him if it worked out.

In the spring, I was wooed away from that job by an offer I couldn’t refuse. I also had in the back of my head that I could date my Super once I was no longer his boss. Fortunately, he was on the same page.

I was leaving at the end of June, so I asked him to take me to the company picnic since I wasn’t invited now that I was no longer an employee.

Shall I say that the rest is history. We were married the next August and have very happily been together 37 years.

I think the key to our happiness was having the chance to get know each other before diving in headfirst.

Oh, and my husband had an accident with a lawnmower at eighteen and is missing half his two fingers. He doesn’t have my father’s hands, nor does he wear a watch. His hands are of the working man. I was glad I took a bet on him; he is now a Vice President of Operations with a very large and successful property management company.