happy birthday (happy anniversary)

“The chain of events, the links in our lives – what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming – and what we do, all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.” 

Avenue of Mysteries, by John Irving

A year ago, I began this blog.  Eight months ago, though,  my life took a left turn and I took a break from writing it or anything really.  Today is my birthday and the break is over.  But more importantly, today is the 20^th anniversary of my first date with Dennis Murphy and I need to tell you about what happened on that night.

On October 17, 1998 I was turning 37.  I had rented a cottage in Mount Washington, a neighborhood north of downtown LA that I had always loved.  The bungalow, as it was known, was a big rectangular room, nearly 40 feet wide, with a wall of windows overlooking a stand of over a dozen redwood trees.  There was a fireplace, a makeshift kitchen, and a bath room in the back.  It was crude, but rustic and charming. I had with me my very special cat – Kitty — who you either loved or hated (I loved).

She played rough. She was very friendly but sometimes she could make you bleed with her friendliness.  She had saved me and she was my baby. I had just returned from a location in Park City, Utah, and without rent to pay, I managed to save up $12,000 that summer.   I had boxes and a few things here and there in the new place.  Mary Jane’s sister loaned me a wooden table and 2 chair.   I was sleeping on a foam pad on the floor the first few nights.  The previous night, Mary Jane and Kelley, who had also returned from Park City, had helped me set up an antique bed frame that I had bought from the production.  It looked great. On my birthday, I had bought myself a mattress for it. It was blue.  Kelley said I couldn’t have my date  — ten years in the making — with the bungalow looking like a moving van.

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A decade before the bungalow, before Mount Washington, before Kitty, I was prepping for a feature at stages in West LA. I was still very new to the movie accounting business.   My friend and then boss, Ray, and I had just returned from a remote location in Nevada (near to where they now hold Burning Man).  It had been a long and dusty summer there with bad diner food, 7 or 8 slot machines, an evil producer, crazy locals, living in trailers, and no AC in the old school that serves as an office.   By contrast, in LA we were setting up in our very civilized studio office — on a Saturday.  It already makes no sense and feels dream-like to be coming in on a Saturday.  I think Ray wanted to make a good impression on his new UPM. Ray’s desk faced the door and mine the wall, so when the UPM stopped in on his Saturday as well, Ray saw him first, and then I turned.  Dennis wore a Hawaiian shirt with red Annie Hall glasses.  He was a little slumped in posture.  He had a kind, relaxed looking face and exuded warmth.  He just stood there and took us both in for a second.  I don’t know anything else at this moment, but I remember it like today.  I felt his goodness.  I loved him at first sight.

Dennis was engaged to someone named Lisa.  He referred to her a lot.  There was a big picture of her on his desk.  He also drove a Maserati and we had to send his checks to a manager.  He was always nice and respectful and treated me like a real professional, even though I felt pretty deer-in-the-headlights.  He dressed like a fun person…vintage shirts and jackets, but also sometimes very elegant silk shirts.  He had a lot of nice shirts.  I never flirted with him. Once he told me once that his ex-wife was named Cyndy.  Beyond that, nothing happened that would suggest he had noticed me.

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But now, Oct 17, 1998, I was standing in the bungalow, putting on a Leo Kotke cd.  Then I was messing around with which song was the right one.   I had changed the music twice already, trying to figure out what I wanted playing when he walked up the driveway, through the redwoods and up to my door.  He had canceled the date once already.  Prior to that we had just hung out once or twice before the summer as friends.  We had met at the beach for brunch.  And we had gone to the Mint to see Harry Dean Stanton.  He had been a perfect gentleman.  (Dennis, not Harry Dean).

Prior to that I had remained in touch using work as the excuse, or occasionally hitting him up for a donation to my theatre company (yes, he sent a check once or twice).

Prior to that I was moving to New York and he called to give me the name of a friend, an ex named Monica, and suggested I look her up for career advice.

Prior to that I had been in a play at East West Players in Silver Lake and he came to see the show on my 32^nd birthday.  Prior to that Lisa had told me that he was going to ask me on a date so I invited her to bring him to my show, and my subsequent birthday party.  Prior to that, well, Ray and I had gone to Sushi Nozawa, and he had told me he was at last going to get me and Dennis on a date.  (I was 31).  Prior to that, he had been engaged to Lisa for the third time and she took a picture of us at Ray’s wedding in Santa Barbara.

And prior to that was a show we did in 1989 called Tales From the Crypt and she was bitching and moaning in my office about him during the death rattle of their relationship.  One day she looked at me and said, “he should be with someone like you.” I turned away.  Or bright red.  I just remember that I thought she read my mind.

Prior to that we are back in West LA on a film called UPWORLD, and I am setting up my office on a Saturday and the UPM stops in and says hello.

“Hello.  I’m Dennis.”

I knew he was someone important in my life, but I didn’t know why yet.

And I know why now of course, but I don’t entirely understand the why of anything.

Dennis walked up the driveway to the bungalow through the trees in his nice green jacket.  He had his long hair in a pony tail and he held a bouquet of yellow roses in his hand.  From then on he would always bring me yellow roses.

Kitty jumped onto his lap and started kneading him and purring like crazy.

The short version is that he moved into the bungalow 6 weeks later.  And on my 38^th birthday we got engaged.  Chances are you probably know the rest of the short version. But I’m not good at short.

After the cat crawled into his lap and staked her claim, after I had put the yellow roses in the vase, he presented me with a birthday gift….a lovely Hopi bracelet.  We left for the restaurant then, and though my choice of Leo Kotke was pretty original (at least I thought), the cd in his producer SUV was Native American flute music.  But seeing as how I had bought us show tickets for a Sondheim revue, I don’t think either one of us had passed for “edgy” (though we headed off for sushi at some very hip, back alley downtown restaurant — his choice).  While dining, he leaned in for a kiss and said “happy birthday!”  I was not used to being treated like a queen, let alone on the first date. During PUTTING IT TOGETHER at the Taper, he gently asked me if it would be okay if he held my hand, and I said yes. He also dozed off during the musical, but since it was a revue, I forgave him and chalked it up to there being no plot. After the show, he drove a little too fast for comfort through the parking lot of the Music Center in his silver Ford Explorer as I held on for dear life.

If you are looking for the exit now, go. I think you get the point.  All I needed to know about my life with Dennis Murphy, I knew on the first date, which was ten years in the making.   Go ahead and miss the best part.

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Our second date was 2 weeks later: Halloween.  And Dennis would never pass up the opportunity to do something with a theme.

We met at the Psychic Eye bookstore in Sherman Oaks.  On this day, he wore a flannel shirt and had his hair loose.  He looked a little wired, but in a fun kind of excited way.  He was knee deep in books about raising the dead when I got there.   Our plan was to hike in and around Topanga Canyon, watch the sunset, have dinner, and then go back to the bungalow for a séance.  He had brought Little Joe with him, his Border Collie mutt.  Dennis had so much gear with him for our little urban wilderness journey, I thought his backpack was going to explode.  By sunset, we were ensconced on a Mexican blanket, with Little Joe, and we snuggled as the sun dipped below the ocean beyond Malibu.  At the bungalow we made a makeshift Ouija board out of butcher paper and pushed a shot glass around it. I am actually a bit of a cynic when it comes to psychic stuff.  I am not sure we summoned any spirits, but we had a memorable first Halloween together, and a successful second date.

Somewhere between our 2^nd and 3^rd date we had a very long phone call about the fact that I was pregnant.  It was actually a series of phone calls.  The earlier ones did not go so good.  He was upset.  I was less upset, but got more upset that he was upset. Then I was very upset. He was bordering on angry.  He had two adult sons; the younger had just finished college, and both were in debt and frustrated with him.  Dennis had just gotten booked on a movie after a 2-year period of unemployment and a bankruptcy.  He was also on a foam mattress on the floor, at Levie’s place in Van Nuys, and his house in Arizona was for under water and for sale.   He was just now putting his life back in order.   Had I turned our perfect first two dates into a personal catastrophe for Dennis?

I asked him to keep an open mind while I sorted out what I wanted to do.  At 37, with no relationship – for many years now – nobody but the universe was talking.  Amidst the panic, I was trying to listen to what she was saying.  She was wearing a giant clock while she spoke.

Though I didn’t know Levie yet, Dennis told me that it was this dear friend who helped him wrap his head around it.  (I think that was what we now call the man up speech).  I remember I was on the bed in the bungalow, talking on the landline, and we were backing up a step and discussing the possibility of being in a relationship.  Dennis had just experienced a short-lived, disastrous marriage a year before that had wreaked havoc on every aspect of his life, and a rocky engagement with someone else a year before that, and another one prior to her.  “I ruin everything” he warned me.  “I will try and control you.”  I just listened. Hard to picture.  I have never had the honor of having a man try to control me.  If anything, I had been suffering from a lack of interest from anyone I had gotten involved with.

When I went to Dr. Dwight for the first time, this exuberant young OB-GYN downtown, he bowled me over with friendliness. Yes I was pregnant.  Approximately 6-7 weeks.  I was about to see the spec of life on the screen next. When we got to the ultrasound, he said, “Okay”….and there was a pause and a change of tone.  “ I’m not seeing a heartbeat here.” I didn’t know what he meant at first.  Then he told me what to expect from my body in the coming days.

I would know Dr. Dwight for many years going forward. Twenty so far, but this was the first time we met.

I was listening.

For our third date, I came to visit Dennis at work.

He was shooting in Long Beach on the Queen Mary.  He had in fact crossed the Atlantic on her in his youth.  He gave me a tour of the bowels of the ship, and we went looking for ghosts in the darkest caverns.  There was a piano in the bar area, and I played and sang a song for no one but Dennis.

Back in our stateroom, we lay on the bed and I cried my eyes out.  He held me tight and said “I got you Cyndy.  I got you.”  He said he felt a little like Obi Wan when he senses that that planet exploded.  A voice in the universe that had suddenly been silenced.  (Or awakened.)

This loss set our relationship on a course that was very focused and very much about being together and starting our family. We got right to the business of our lives as if there was no time to waste. (there wasn’t, as it turns out).  It was not only fun, but was a healing experience for us both.  Dennis had many regrets just then.  He had kind of made a mess of things personally and financially, in an effort to try and fix people who he cared about.  I have a similar tendency.  There were a lot of great things happening for me professionally and creatively, but, outside of the fierce cat who bit hard and loved hard, I didn’t have a personal life. We didn’t need each other, but recognized we could move our lives ahead together and not interfere with things we each wanted to do.  I don’t know if we ever put it quite in those words, but I know that we agreed if we had dated in 1988, it would never have amounted to anything.

One year later, on my birthday, in 1999, we saw Cirque du Soleil in Santa Monica.  Afterwards, we rode the ferris wheel at the pier, and he snapped this picture of me.

Then he drove me to Little Tokyo and, in front of the Go For Broke Monument, he knelt down and asked me to marry him.  He had saved the money for the ring.  We would try and get pregnant in the new year.

So we worked hard and played hard.  We made money.  Saved money.  Spent money.  Went into debt and then prospered again and went into debt again.  We traveled. We saw elephants and leopards and temples .  We made a beautiful home in Mount Washington.  We got drunk and filled our bellies.  We sobered, nursed our young and cleaned their bottoms.  We cared for our mothers and cleaned theirs too.  We said good bye to them and to Kitty and Little Joe.  We buried three sisters:  Teri, Susan and Judy. We fought, disagreed, but always shared the same values.  He dreamed, I was pragmatic, but we both took risks. Both of us, we gave it our all.   I like to remember that we didn’t waste time, which is so precious.  We did nothing perfectly but we never gave up.

Dennis always said that I changed his life.  It’s actually true. But I can say the same.  The beautiful gifts he gave me are everywhere I turn. I’m so blessed I can’t stand it. The journey to have our children, and to raise them, is the most important, the most meaningful thing I’ve ever known.  Through the worst moments of our turbulent marriage, it is what always brought us back to center.  “I have the tiger by the tail” he wrote in his journal.  We both alternated sabotaging everything we worked for at times, but we both know we were crazy to pack so much into a short span of time.  I could never have done what we did without Dennis.  He could never have done it without me.  We knew that.  It always brought us back from the brink of self destruction.

In one week from today, the baby we conceived after our engagement– our son Sam — will turn 18 years old.  When our daughter reaches this milestone, Dennis will have been gone for four years.  It boggles my mind, but it makes we all the more grateful for the life he gave us.

Today is the twenty year anniversary of the start of our journey. I see him walking up the oval driveway with the yellow roses, loose, in his left hand.  But now his long brown and auburn hair is loose and wavy.  He is excited about walking through the door to me and the life we are about to make.  He is open. We don’t’ know what’s about to happen, but it has been worth the wait and the scars.