My stepson – my ex-wife’s son from her first marriage – is getting married in New York next April.

He and his fiance were in town on Friday for a bridal shower. Bun and I drove out to Saint Louis Park to attend (Zam, being a typical 14 year old, was more interested in going to the party at the Rec Center than hanging around a condo with a bunch of grownups, even if it included his brother and future sister-in-law. Although he did call as the party was breaking up – Rec had let out early, and could I please drive back to Saint Paul through the freezing rain and come and get him and bring him out to the party? He’s so cute…)

Pardon a little reminiscence, here.

I was Will’s stepfather from age nine to about 17 or so. He graduated from high school roughly about the time of the divorce. I haven’t seen him much since then – not so much through alienation as the scrum of life for a couple of adults in fairly different worlds.

Will’s always been a fairly amazing guy. Blazingly sharp as a kid, he was also a very typical teenager; an awful lot like Zam, in fact, they look very similar when they sleep and act kinda alike when they’re awake (and are equally hard to wake up, come to think of it).

After high school, he took a part-time job with a store in a local “move it yourself” chain. The store – on University Avenue, in Frogtown – was a tumbledown wreck, a dysfunctional mess. Will started as a part-time employee, and in six months was not only managing the place, but had turned it into the region’s star performer. I talked with another store manager in the chain after Will had been there a year and a half or so; “You’re Will‘s stepdad?”, the guy exclaimed. “He’s a rock star in the region!”

He met his fiance, Eve, back in high school. The idealist in me sees the kind of story you want to see in this day and age; they met, they got together, they dated for years; even after she moved back to New York, they had a commuter relationship for several years (and it worked!), he finally moved to New York a few years ago (aided by the company, where he was considered such a key performer that they gave him a regional management job in their Metro NYC office when he said he wanted to move), they got engaged.

The cynic in me thinks…

…oh, who cares what the cynic thinks. I’m going to shut him up for a while.

Anyway. I’m proud of him. And happy for him.

Will has one thing I really envy; having lived in one place into his early twenties, he has one, big, close-knit group of friends, the same people who’ve been in his life since way back when I knew him. It was fun seeing them all again, all grown-up and…adult, in a way that I’d never expected ten-odd years ago. I talked with some of them for the first time in close to ten years; scatterbrained teenagers had turned into…

…well, all manner of adults. Noah – Will’s main pal back then, with whom Will got into all sorts of scrapes and trouble and plenty of fun as well, is a construction project manager (he does a ton of work for a former employer; we know some of the same people), married, with a one-year-old.

It kinda gave me some hope, I thought, after I got home and dealt with another day of Zam-related turmoil.

…
And the cold whack upside the head of realizing that Will is almost exactly the same age, now, as I was when I met his mother. Was I really that…young, then?

Don’t start singing “The Circle of Life” on me, capisce?

Anyway – congrats, Will and Eve. Can’t wait for the wedding.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Men and Women, mitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.