Unanswered Prayers

I have been sitting here thinking about the few times in my life when I have really wanted something and not gotten it.

Two of the biggest of them involve wanting dead men to show up and tell everyone that the accident or cancer scare was just a big misunderstanding and could we all just stop crying and maybe have some beers and some rice krispy treats and celebrate and listen to one of them play some bluegrass music on a very beloved banjo. But, dead men don't start breathing again, and, so, in the realm of things that I WANTED, and that were POSSIBLE, the two that stick out in my head are as follows:

1. a man named Tom
2. a job with a government agency that shall not be named

The man named Tom was my first college love and we were going to get married and have two children and live in a white house with green shutters and have an orange cat and a dachshund and live happily ever after. Until his mom told him he had to break up with me, and we spent the next six months hiding our relationship from the craziest woman in the state of Michigan. And then I put my foot down and told him that I was nothing to be ashamed of and that he was a 22 year old man who could date who he wanted. And I told him to choose. (Hoping he would choose me, of course.) And he grieved and he cried and grieved some more and then told me he couldn't choose. Weeks went by of this limbo. And so I put my foot down (I remember this sunny May day like it was yesterday) and I said, "then, I'm choosing. And I'm choosing ME. I am choosing to walk away from you and I hope to God you stand up to that woman and come and find me. " And I started to walk away and he grabbed me and picked me up and he kissed me like the end of a Humphrey Bogart movie, and tears poured down his face and he hugged me so hard I thought my ribs would break, and he said, "I'll come find you. I'll come find you when I can." And he turned and ran away from me, down a hill in an arboretum in Hillsdale, Michigan.

And I never saw him again. I wanted to. For months, maybe years, I wanted him to show up on my doorstep. (One time, a few weeks before we officially broke it off, he told me he would show up at my wedding like that scene The Graduate.) (For the record, he didn't, although my mother confessed later that she worried that he would.)

But, then, almost two years later, I met my husband. And then I knew - it was THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD that Tom was a wimp and couldn't leave his mother. Because I was MEANT TO BE with the man who is my husband. Fate did me a favor that day.

(I wondered for a decade what had happened to Tom. And when I found out, ten years to the day after that May day, I almost fell out of my chair. (It was so shocking because that guy was one of the kinkiest sons of bitches I ever met.) And the answer is, he became a Roman Catholic priest. Chew on that one for a minute or two...)

2. the job with the government agency that shall not be named.

I had three interviews for this job that I wanted, each one longer than the last, the final interview lasting three days in Washington D.C.

I desperately wanted the job, I could taste it I wanted it so bad. And I did not get it.

That was in January of 1999. Two years later, some horrible people flew some airplanes into some buildings and killed some 3000 people, some of them in the offices where I might have been, had I gotten that job. And some of the people who worked for that agency were blamed for the failures that led to those people flying those airplanes into those buildings, and GUESS WHO IS THE KIND OF PERSON who would never have forgiven herself for her own failures, had she been working for that agency, at that time? That's right. You guessed it. Me.

So, I am telling myself that the times when I have most wanted something that was truly POSSIBLE and it didn't happen, were blessings in disguise. Which is not to say they didn't break me heart at the time. It's just that in the long run, it was fortunate that I did not get that which I so desperately wanted.

That is all.

I still have not heard anything from our agency...but, I don't expect to hear anything for about an hour or two...