How I Met Your Mother -- Lizzy Edition

I was divorced from my first wife, Nikki, in 1987, thankfully with no kids to worry about. After the divorce I started dating again and decided to clean up my act.  If you do the math you'll see that I was 39 in 1987 so this involved a new wardrobe, a new hair style (including coloring the gray away--a stupid move especially since it came out looking green sometimes), and joining a gym.

I began going to a low-impact aerobics class, mainly because there were some very hot babes taking the class and if I was in the back row the view made up for the "pain" of the aerobics. I developed a "talk before class" kind of friendship with the married woman who was always to my right in the back row. ("Donna big boobs" was how I knew her.)

Fast forward to the night of January 28, 1989. I had been out for dinner at Big Jim's in the Greenfield area of Pittsburgh with a friend who had been best man at my first wedding and we were heading home. For some reason we were both wearing our seat belts -- something I didn't always do in those days. We were driving up Bates Street hill from Second Ave. and a big Caddy was driving down the hill and made the left onto the on-ramp to the Parkway without yielding, causing a near head-on at a combined speed of perhaps 70 mph (35 for each of us.) My 1984 Audi 4000 did not have airbags, but the worst that happened (besides a totaled car) was that my friend got a bruise across his chest from the seat belt. (For the record, since that day I always wear my seat belt.) Best case had I not been wearing the seat belt is that I would have been too banged up to go to the gym on the following Monday and what follows would not have happened.

On that Monday, January 30 I did make it to the gym and when I entered my normal low impact aerobics class I immediately noticed that Donna wasn't there. Just before class started an exceedingly cute blonde took Donna's normal position and I immediately noticed nothing on her ring finger. At some point during the class the instructor said "grapevine left" and being as coordinated then as I have ever been, I immediately moved to my right and collided with the cute blonde.

A Cute Blonde

As I helped her up we got into a conversation and I asked if I could buy her a Coke after the class in the gym's snack bar. After she said yes, she spent the rest of the class asking herself "why did I agree?" But she showed up and I learned that she normally was in the high impact aerobics class, but that night she had arrived too late to get a space and so had tried the low impact class. If that hadn't happened, or if Donna had shown up, or if I hadn't been so dazzled that I lost track of left and right, or if I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt the Saturday before, etc. I would never have met the love of my life -- Barbara, and there would be no Lizzy.

Another Cute Blonde