by Hale, Mandy
“This is my friend Mandy I was telling you about,” she said with a big smile, pointing to the empty seat beside me. “I think you two should get to know each other!” She leaned down and whispered covertly in my ear, “He’s single!” Then she was gone, skipping off toward the dance floor, and Mr. E was sliding into the booth beside me. He was even cuter up close.
I smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry. My friend is a little overeager for me to meet someone,” I explained.
I sat there, fiddling with the straw in my soda cup for a long moment. This was the moment with guys where I usually froze up and transitioned into an awkward, rambling mess. Or worse, went completely mute. Please, God, don’t let me do that with this guy, I silently prayed.
“So what’s your story, Mandy?” Mr. E asked, tipping his fedora back a little on his head and shifting in his seat so we were face-to-face. His eyes were an interesting sea-foam color, not quite green yet not quite blue.
I took a deep breath and launched into the short version of my story. His eyes lit up as I mentioned my background in journalism.
“Wow, that’s awesome! I’m a journalist!” he said brightly. “I actually just moved here from Wilmington, North Carolina, where I wrote for a—”
“Wait a minute,” I interjected. “You moved here from where?”
“Wilmington, North Carolina. Have you heard of it? It’s a great little town on the coast.”
I laughed. “Heard of it? It’s one of my favorite places in the world!”
He grinned. “No way! You’ve been there?”
“Yes, and I loved it. A friend and I visited because we were huge fans of the show Dawson’s Creek, and we actually ended up getting to be extras on the show!”
He put his hand over his heart and looked at me intently. “Mandy, I was once an extra on Dawson’s Creek,” he said in amazement. He began to make a thumping motion with the hand that was over his heart. “This is incredible. Where have you been all my life?”
He went on to tell me he was from Boone, North Carolina, and had recently moved to Nashville to write for a small county newspaper just outside the city. He had a big family he was close to, he loved God, and he loved to dance. We even took a few turns on the dance floor that night, where he twirled me around and around until I was dizzy. Dizzy from the dancing or dizzy from the butterflies still fluttering away in my stomach, I wasn’t sure. We sat in that booth and talked for hours that night, and I was already halfway in love with him by the time we got ready to say good night.
We made plans to see each other the following weekend. I asked him to attend a special formal dance with me at my studio, and he said yes without hesitation. He leaned in and gave me a quick peck on the cheek, releasing my hand so I could go join my friends.
“Hey!” I called out before he got too far away.
He paused, turning back to face me, people walking back and forth in the distance between us.
“Yes?” he asked.
“What would you have done if my friend hadn’t ‘picked you up’ for me?” I finally asked.
He smiled, considering my question. Then he grinned brilliantly.
“I would have assumed you were already taken, or out of my league,” he responded with a wink before touching the corner of his fedora in a farewell gesture and vanishing into the crowd.
Mr. E, indeed.
I went home that night and told my mom I had met the man I was going to marry. I told her how, much like Prince Charming, Mr. E had swept me out onto the dance floor and off of my feet. I told her about his family and about everything we had in common and about how excited I was to find a man who loved God. I told her he almost seemed too good to be true.
And I guess he was. He stood me up for our first date a week later.
I couldn’t believe it. How could I have been so wrong about him?
I sat in my car at the dance studio that night in my formal gown and cried tears of disappointment and embarrassment. He did at least call me to tell me he wasn’t coming, which I guess was better than just not showing up, but still—it stung. My first foray back into the dating world in years, and it ended in disaster.
But I was all dressed up with someplace to go, so I dried my tears, deleted his number from my phone, and escorted myself to the ball.
After that, I tried to forget about Mr. E. It was clearly a giant red flag that he didn’t show up for our first date, and I didn’t want to sit around crying over a guy who obviously wasn’t sitting around worrying about me. So I kept dancing, I hung out with my friends from the studio, and I even went out on a few dates. None were really worth writing home about, though.
As much as I tried to deny my wandering thoughts and tried not to let my mind drift to Mr. E, I still couldn’t help but look around for him when I was out with friends. Particularly when we were somewhere with a dance floor. Regardless of his complete lack of first-date decorum, I still couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that we had made a real connection.
It was five months later, right around the time that I stopped looking for Mr. E, when he reemerged. It was at a museum benefit in downtown Nashville. I was walking out of the ladies’ room when I heard a voice behind me.
“Mandy?”
I turned, seeing him but not quite recognizing him.
“You’re Mandy, right?” he went on, walking toward me.
“Yes,” I replied, a little hesitantly. Did I know this guy?
“It’s me. Mr. E.” (Obviously he said his real name here, as he didn’t know I referred to him as Mr. E. But he would no longer be a mystery if I revealed his identity.)
My face flushed as I finally made the connection. “Oh! H-hi,” I stammered. “I didn’t recognize you.”
“I thought it was you.” He smiled. “Or hoped, actually.”
I gave him a Look. That’s Look with a capital L.
“Really? Because you didn’t seem too anxious to see me the night you stood me up,” I said before I could stop myself.
“You’re right,” he replied sheepishly. “I was a jerk. I should have showed up that night.”
“So why didn’t you?” I asked. “I really thought we made a connection.”
“We did,” he interrupted. “Look.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts. “I got a new phone a couple of months ago, and I didn’t transfer a lot of numbers over. But I transferred yours.” He showed me the listing in his phone. “It was weird. Even though I knew you probably never wanted to talk to me again, I couldn’t bring myself to take your number out of my phone.”
I stared at him for a long moment, not really knowing what to believe. He held my gaze.
“I don’t understand, though. Help me understand,” I said. “If you thought we made a connection, and I thought we made a connection, why did you stand me up?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, shaking his head. “I’ve asked myself the same thing. I guess I just got scared.”
“C’mon,” I scoffed. “Isn’t that the oldest line in the book? Do guys even really get scared?”
“They do when they meet girls like you,” he shot back, rendering me silent. Then suddenly he smiled.
“What?” I asked, trying to decide if I felt annoyed or charmed. Maybe a little bit of both.
“Let’s dance!” He grabbed my hand and pulled me out on the dance floor where we ended up dancing the night away. It was impossible to stay mad at him. He was so filled with joy, mischief, and exuberance for life that he was almost childlike.
As we said good night a few hours later, I reached over and punched him lightly in the arm.
“So since you never erased my number from your phone, are you going to call me this time?” I asked with a grin.
He smiled.
“You can bet on it.”
With that, he disappeared into the crowd, like he had the first time I met him.
A few moments later, as I was walking out of the museum with my girlfriends, my phone lit up. It was an unknown number.
/> “Hello?”
“Hi.” It was him.
I smiled. “Hi.”
“Told you I’d call you.”
Thus began my summer of Mr. E.
We both loved to dance, so I think we hit every dance floor in Nashville that summer. Nashville has some of the best live music in the country, so we listened to a lot of it. He met my friends. I met his friends. I actually ended up becoming really good friends with his best friend, Crawford. Mr. E and I went to pool parties. He took me to see one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and I got more of a kick out of watching him than I did watching the movie. He sat in his seat, Indian-style, like a child, and laughed and cheered with abandon throughout the entire movie. He was so delightfully weird in the best possible way. The most appealing thing about him was that he lived almost entirely in the moment. He wasn’t caught up in what had happened or what was going to happen. The now had his full and unwavering attention.
I soon learned that was also one of the most infuriating things about him. With Mr. E, if you were out of sight, you tended to be out of mind. He was so captivated by whatever and whoever was in front of him in the present moment, it was difficult to be the person who wasn’t standing in front of him. We would have a great couple of weeks, then he would vanish for a month. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend by any means, but it was still endlessly frustrating to feel as if we were finally getting close and then have him pull away. I swore every time he would do one of his vanishing acts that I was done, I was through, and I wasn’t putting up with it anymore. Then he would reappear and be so fun, so charismatic, and so easy to be around that I would forget why I was ever upset with him in the first place.
He was incredibly adventurous and spontaneous. I would soon come to recognize the tone in his voice when he was about to drag me into an escapade that I would never have been brave enough to do on my own. “How adventurous are you feeling?” he would ask me with a grin, and then I knew something really crazy was coming, like “Let’s climb up to the roof of my office building to look at the stars,” or “Let’s drive thirty minutes to the lake at two in the morning for night swimming.”
Our first kiss happened on the other end of one of his “How adventurous are you feeling?” moments. It was the Fourth of July, and we had been to dinner with some of my friends and then watched the fireworks show over the Nashville riverfront. It was starting to get late, but all over the city, people were still shooting off their own firecrackers. We were walking hand in hand back to my car when he noticed, towering above us, a massive construction crane. There were some new high-rise condos going up, and the crane stretched at least twenty stories into the air.
“How adventurous are you feeling?” he said with a grin, looking from me to the crane and back again.
“Oh no,” I said. “There is no way we are climbing that. Do you hear me? No way!”
A few minutes later, though, I was darting after him, giggling as we made our way through the dark construction site to find the foot of the crane. “We can’t do this!” I whispered. “We’re going to get in trouble!”
“C’mon,” he said. “How many times in life do you think we’re going to get a chance to do something like this? This is something we will never forget. You can probably see the entire city from up there!”
“Well, my guess would be zero more times, because we’re probably going to plunge off of this crane to our deaths! It could be unstable, or broken, or someone might see us and call the cops!”
“Mandy, construction workers climb these every day,” he reasoned. “It’s not illegal.”
Somehow his reasoning started to make sense, and a few minutes later I found myself removing my heels and following him up the ladder to the crane above. We climbed three or four stories before I convinced him that we were high enough. As we turned to face the city, I gasped.
Stretching before us, a sea of sparkly lights, was Nashville. All around the city, in different areas of town, people were shooting off firecrackers, and the lights from the fireworks combined with the lights of the city created a stunning effect.
“This is breathtaking,” I breathed, hardly able to speak.
“So are you,” he said, leaning over and kissing me for the first time.
He was right. It was a moment I never forgot.
Chapter 10
A Destination—or a Stop Along the Way?
For the rest of the summer and fall, very little changed between me and Mr. E. We always had a blast and continued to spend time together and see each other casually, but it didn’t really feel like it was progressing. A lot of people might argue, “If the relationship wasn’t moving forward, why did you stay in it?” And the reason was simple. I was only in my late twenties, and I wasn’t looking to get married anytime soon anyway. Since I had missed out on so many dating experiences between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself and have a good time now, since I felt absolutely no pressure to be married? Mr. E wasn’t offering me a commitment, but I also wasn’t asking for one, so what we had worked perfectly for me in that moment.
But even though my relationship with Mr. E wasn’t moving forward, my life definitely was. By fall 2007, I had grown weary of working from home with only my cat to keep me company. I was becoming increasingly restless in my position with the web-based company and was eager for new opportunities. When I came across a job listing for a public relations specialist position at a new nonprofit in Nashville, I decided I would fill out the online application and see what happened.
I was offered the job. Once again I would be commuting to Nashville from Murfreesboro and working in the big city for the first time since I worked at CMT. This was a big move for me, and I knew I was ready.
It was also time to start thinking about moving back to Nashville. Not on my own accord. Prayerfully this time. I talked to God about it and asked Him to open up the right doors at the right time and let me know when to walk through them.
On September 4, 2007, I started my new job. The company was a state-funded nonprofit working to make high-speed Internet available to everyone in Tennessee. Unbelievably, there were still people in rural areas of Tennessee who could only get access to dial-up (as in, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail, you-can-hear-the-phone-dialing-and-ringing-as-it-connects dial-up). As the public relations specialist, I would be responsible for drafting communications pieces for the company, like newsletters, press releases, and media advisories. I fit in well with my coworkers, caught on to my job quickly, and knew I had made the right decision by following God’s urging and my gut to embark on a new career path.
I was thrilled to learn that one of my job responsibilities would be coordinating one of the programs the company oversaw that provided free computers to underprivileged children and families. I got to be very hands-on with the program, actually traveling out into the community to meet the kids and families that the program was affecting. Their stories were amazing. It didn’t take long for me to see how special the program was, and that got my wheels turning about how to better spotlight it.
Since I had laid down my TV ambitions two years prior, I hadn’t worn my producer hat in a long time, but now I was suddenly itching to put it back on. The door on that part of my life had closed so suddenly and seemed so final that I hadn’t even attempted to revisit it. But now, knowing we had a chance to touch even more families with this program if we could make more people aware of it, I began to hatch an idea to produce a short documentary, profiling one of the foster youths who received a computer from the program. I tapped Mr. E’s best friend, Crawford, for the project since he was a director and ran his own freelance production company.
Crawford was a spirited, fun, insanely goofy guy who had never met a stranger and loved God with his whole being. He also happened to have a young son whom he adored and a wife who had just recently and very abruptly filed for divorce for reasons that weren’t clear to Crawford. In spite of his heartbreak, he was always t
he brightest light in any room and was one of those rare people who never let his circumstances take away his joy. We had a blast as we started to plan the ins and outs of the documentary, and I knew I had made the right decision in bringing him in on the project.
One day we were sitting there going over our storyboards and talking about the best, most impactful way to tell the story when Crawford suddenly leapt to his feet. “Wait! That’s it!” he exclaimed, raising one finger in the air, much like you would picture Albert Einstein doing upon his discovery of the theory of relativity. “I’ve got it!”
“You’ve got what?” I sat the chair up that he had tipped over in his excitement.
“You know who always gets the best version of every story?” Crawford asked, his eyes lit up like the Fourth of July. “Also known as the Best Interviewer in the World?!”
“Who?” I asked. Then it dawned on me. “Oh! You mean E?”
“Yes!” Crawford boomed. “You produce, I direct, and we bring E in to interview the subjects. It’s perfect!”
I thought about it for a moment. It really was perfect. Even though Mr. E only wrote for a tiny, small-town newspaper, he was an amazing interviewer, and his articles were always brilliantly written.
Mr. E jumped onboard enthusiastically, and before I knew it, we were full steam ahead on the project. And a funny thing started to happen as Mr. E and I worked so closely together. We grew closer. Our relationship actually started to feel like, well, a relationship. I remember one day when we were all riding along to our next shoot, Crawford and Mr. E in the front seat and me in the back going over the notes for our next interview. Suddenly Mr. E reached his hand around from the front seat and clasped mine. We held hands the entire way, from front seat to back, until we got to our next stop. I glanced up at the rearview mirror at one point and saw him smiling back at me. He winked and squeezed my hand a little tighter. To anyone else this might seem like a fairly insignificant gesture, but to know Mr. E at all was to know better. Instead of his usual teasing or friendly slugging me in the arm or chasing me around to tickle me like we were eight, he just wanted to hold my hand. And when he reached back to hold my hand that day, he also grabbed my heart in a new way.