Column: Pass the Hot Dish, by Ali Kloster

“Ducky!”

“Lazarus?”

Those round sticky patches used to monitor heart patients popped from my father’s chest like champagne corks, while the chorus of machines surrounding him angrily howled and sung.

I thought he was unconscious, dozing at best, but he sat up in his hospital bed with clear eyes fixed on me and pointed toward the door. “Ducky, you’re going. You are going on that blind date.”

“You better listen,” my mother warned.

“Fine. I’ll go, but you’re pretty bossy for a guy with oxygen tubes up his nose.”

“You’ll thank me later,” he promised.

I doubted that.

Romantic comedies are full of couples that “meet cute.” Some contrived scenario crashes into the middle of two ordinary lives. They fall in love. There’s a bit of conflict, a dreamy musical montage, and 110 minutes later another one of the greatest loves stories of all time is burned into the annals of celluloid history.

Take, for example, the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan meet cute online in “You’ve Got Mail” or the way Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan meet cute on the radio in “Sleepless in Seattle.” In “Joe Versus the Volcano” Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan meet cute three times. I’ve forgotten how, but one time is definitely on a boat. I think.

I didn’t meet cute with my husband. I met cute with his mother.

A single gal living in a cozy, lakeside, one stoplight town rarely finds her dance card full on a Saturday night. Most people move there to raise children, retire or enter into witness protection, but I loved it, so I stayed and years drifted across Lake Michigan in a pleasant routine without much notice.

It was not quite spring when my niece, Annie, and I walked into Harbor Antiques to look for unsuitable vintage hats. Another Valentine’s Day had been massacred a few weeks before, but I’d stopped caring sometime around the turn of the century. We were admiring a velvety brown topper sprouting enough plumes and feathers to suit Captain Hook, when a woman appeared behind us and congenially started up a conversation about antique hatpins. “This one has a mother of pearl tip and you should meet my son!” she pronounced, taking a hairpin turn and applying too little segue.

I listened as she extolled the virtues of her perfect son in Minnesota and quickly made a run for the exit.

“You should meet him, Ali. He sounds nice,” Annie coaxed. The poor girl didn’t dream about a baby brother or sister. She just wanted an uncle.

“Annie, where are we?

“Elk Rapids.”

“Right. Elk Rapids, Michigan. There is already one giant, unmovable obstacle between The No. 1 Son and me.”

“What’s that?”

“Wisconsin. Now let’s go.”

A year passed before I found myself in the same corner of Harbor Antiques admiring the Captain Hook hat again. No one had bought him. His feathers drooped a little lower, but I could see life in him still. I heard a voice behind me. It couldn’t be. I turned around. It was “The Twilight Zone.” It was “Fiddler on the Roof.” The same matchmaking mama was casting the very same line. The words, “Lady, what in heaven’s name is wrong with your kid?” formed in my mouth, but I reined them in. Another uneventful year had passed, another year of Valentines from my third-grade students. One of them even crossed out the traditional, “Be Mine” and wrote, “Miss Kloster, are you ever getting married?”

I caved. “Do you have his e-mail address?” Of course she did. “I’ll take this hat, too.”

What was I supposed to say to a complete stranger? That his mom wanted me to meet him? I wore Captain Hook’s hat as I sat at the computer. It gave me courage.

Vacation schedules, flight plans and cautious nerves miraculously aligned and a time was set to meet the next time he was in town. On date night’s eve my father was rushed to the hospital with chest pains. I stood at the foot of his hospital bed with my mother. “I’m staying here.” I announced. “I know a bad omen when it hits me in the face. I’m not leaving you and daddy to go meet some stranger. A stranger who just wandered in from Minnesota! Are you kidding me? No. I won’t go.”

That is when my dad popped out of his wires and tubes and turned me out of the room. He recovered quickly. He ordered his atrial fibrillation to stop and it did, because everybody does what he says.

I waited in the rain outside the restaurant. It was that freezing, murky, springtime rain that Midwesterners know intimately.

A man walked up to me. “I’m Paul Graham,” he announced with an easy confidence.

I regretted not doing some wishful grooming. Would it have killed me to curl a few eyelashes or drag a lipstick across my mouth? I didn’t know what to say to him, so I asked the only logical question I could think of under the circumstances, “Do you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain?”

His face grew into a smile right there in front of me. He didn’t laugh. He said, “That was legitimately funny, Kloster.”

Then he opened the door and invited me to come in from the cold. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t contrived. It wasn’t at all like the movies. It was better.

Woodbury resident Alexandra Kloster appears each Sunday. She may be reached at alikloster@yahoo.com, and her blog is Radishes at Dawn at alexandrakloster.com.