He took large, hard bites that made my teeth hurt to watch. His noisy swallowing reminded me of the sound you hear underwater but administered in blasts. A kind of blaring white noise foghorn
From time to time he would take aerated sips of wine and smack smack smack his lips. It was gross.
I had no difficulty making a decision. When the date ended, I knew this was not the man I was going to marry.
At my front door, he reached out and shook my hand. But he didn’t let go. He held on to it and held on to it. I wanted to pull away, fearing that he might raise it to his lips and chew a hunk out of it.
“You’re the quietest eater I’ve gone out with in a long time,” he said.
“I hope this means I can come up so you get to hear me eat a late-night snack or two.”
I laughed so hard, I knew I was in love. Table manners aside, he was the funniest person I’ve ever known, and that’s what sold me on him.
We’d shared many noisy meals over the years, and I’d enjoyed every one of them. He’d always drown me out. Conversations, at least from my side, tended to be higher volume than you’d expect at the dinner table.
And then one night he put down his fork, looked at me, and began to cry.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
He said he couldn’t hide it any longer. He didn’t love me anymore, had been having an affair with a woman at work.
“She and I want to get married,” he said, blowing his nose into his napkin.
I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I’d sensed the distancing already. Hey, maybe I’d been falling out of love with him, too, as he inched away from me.
“Fine,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’ll file the papers.”
I stood up from the table and walked out of the restaurant. It was all handled by our lawyers. I never had to see him again.
And just when I was sitting about as close to rock bottom as I could imagine, I ran across the ad in a medical journal. They wanted a second coroner back home in Honolulu.
I knew I’d be perfect for the job. The dead work best among the dead,” I thought. Grim, huh? But it would be comfortable, no conversations, no more breaking of bad news to patients. I knew I would blend right in.
When I say that jerk was the funniest man I ever met, that’s true.
But the second best was David Chan. We hit it off right away on day one in tenth-grade homeroom at Roosevelt High School.
A pretty brave guy, I have to say. Striking up a conversation with me. Kind of a lady’s man, looking back on it. He had his patter down pretty well.
While we were waiting for the bell, he asked me what was the funniest joke I knew. I sat there thinking and, you know, I couldn’t come up with a single one. Not a riddle, not a joke, nothing.
“I’ll give you one to get you started,” he said. “Here’s a riddle. How do you know if an elephant’s been in your refrigerator?”
Believe it or not, I’d never heard an elephant joke. Before I could take a guess, the bell rang, and Mrs. Butler came in.
“I don’t know,” I whispered as she wrote her name on the board.
“You can see his footprints in the Jell-O.”
“That’s not funny,” I said.
“Yes it is,” he said. “I guess I’m gonna have to work on your sense of humor.”
The way he smiled, now that was funny. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Butler said, snapping her fingers and pointing at me with this super stern teacher face. “Is there something funny?”
David cut in, deflecting her focus off of me. “It’s your name,” he said. “My dad’s a homicide detective with HPD, and I bet if this was a murder scene, he’d say you did it.”
Well, that got me laughing again. And Mrs. Butler, amazingly, she laughed, too. She turned out to be quite a character herself. Her riddle repertoire, especially her knock-knock joke catalog, was deep. We all loved her. She told us at the end of the school year that she always did the strict teacher thing until she thought it was safe to smile, usually a few weeks into the semester.
With us, she said, and especially with David carrying on every morning in homeroom, she had to forget about that strategy from day one. She enjoyed him a lot. We all did. He made the start of the school day something to look forward to.
Not just a class clown, though, David was a serious student, too. We became best friends right off the bat.
Lanning Lee 