alec baldwin, three dates and a nubbin

About a year or so ago I was set up on a blind date with an artisan furniture maker named John, whose great claim to fame was that Alec Baldwin had recently commissioned a coffee table from him. Or rather, Alec Baldwin's designer had commissioned it. Alec Baldwin, I assume, paid for it -- indirectly, I'm sure -- but still. Somewhere in the world, Alec Baldwin's feet are kicked up on a coffee table designed and built by a guy with whom I shared too few, tiny plates of Spanish tapas and pretty decent conversation.

It is such a small world.

Anyway, a work friend set us up because we are the only two "arty" people she knows. (Her word not mine.) I don't consider myself arty. And frankly, I don't really go for arty when it comes to men. But John wasn't so much arty as unstarched, and unstarched is okay by me. Plus he worked with his hands and specifically with wood, which I think is very cool. Very masculine. Practical and sexy all in one. Also his name is John, like every one of my blood male relations and I don't like change. So things were looking good.

Of course appearances can be deceiving.

Yes, sadly, despite his woodworking ways, intrinsic John-ishness and two degrees of separation from Alec Baldwin, we only lasted a couple of dates beyond the first and I have to say that I use the word "date" loosely. In the junior high school sense of the word. In the group date sense of the word. Because, on our two subsequent so-called dates I spent more time with his friends than I did with him. Which was fine really, except that I have friends already and wasn't really looking for more, especially friends of the second-hand variety, even if they'd only been gently used. Second-hand friends have a way of wearing thin and tearing away easily when/if the relationship goes sour. I speak with no bitterness, but from hard-won experience. A little tip: foster those friendships after the ring is on the finger.

Be pleasant before.

Be friends after.

That said, I was being pleasant as I proceeded to devour an entire serving tray of Swedish meatballs while one female friend of John's cornered me to enumerate his many, varied and wonderful attributes. An expressive little thing, she was given to wild hand gesticulation, which in her case was particularly captivating because the ring finger of her married hand was no more than a vestigial finger nubbin, lopped off at the second knuckle. Now, I dare say an unacknowledged and unexplained finger nubbin is enough to distract anyone, but to make matters worse, this girl was wearing her wedding ring on the nubbin. And what with all the waving and the lack of a knuckle-stop (Wasn't she worried about it losing it?), I half expected the ring to fly off and hit me in the eye. I kept fighting the urge to flinch and duck.

Needless to say, it was very distracting, especially since the word "nubbin" kept repeating itself in my head, drowning out whatever she happened to be saying. I was desperate to know how the nubbin came about, but aside from it being horribly rude to ask such things, she wouldn't shut up long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.

But the brain is an amazing machine, as I've been learning due to my recent obsession with Scientific American Mind. And as it repeated the word nubbin over and over again, it was, of it's own accord, creating associations for the nubbin, cobbling together meaning, creating for the nubbin a raison d'etre. It was doing with the nubbin what it typically does with dreams. It was attempting to make logical sense of a disparate set of facts.

And this is what my brain deduced:

This girl was a friend of John the carpenter. Carpenters use sharp whirly-bladed tools. Those whirly bladed tools have been known in the past to sever carelessly placed fingers. This girl with her spastic hand-waving had certainly carelessly involved her finger in a carpentry accident. Perhaps while with John in his shop. And somehow my brain decided that she'd bravely taken his severing. Somehow. Somehow, she was nubbin'd by proxy. Her finger was the sacrificial Sydney Carton with no real purpose in life to John's finger's Charles Darnay. And John needed his Darnay so that he could complete the worthy task of creating a coffee table for Alec Baldwin.

I have to admit that the intimacy of that connection, signaled by the nubbin, made me a little uncomfortable. Suddenly I was the third wheel on my own date, which was confirmed when nubbin girl, too drunk to drive, her own husband long-gone from the party, asked John of all the many people she knew at the party for a ride home.

And suddenly I understood why she'd been so damn friendly all along. And why she'd stuck so close. And why John, for most of the evening, was nowhere to be found. And why all night she'd been waving that hand in the air, like she just didn't care if it flew into the crock pot of beef stew and was lost to her forever. And I wondered if her husband knew, too.