Whenever I order cocktails, they rarely come with little paper umbrellas. Fun and whimsical though these may be, they’re usually reserved for tropical drinks. Piña coladas, Mai Tais, that sort of thing. Which I never order. If/when I get my tiki bar, you can bet your ass I’ll have a whole drawer full of tiny cocktail umbrellas. But other than a lime wedge and a straw, my drinks are usually pretty spartan.
Which is why Saturday threw me for a loop. We went out for lunch at a new-to-us Mexican restaurant, and much to my surprise, my margarita came with an umbrella.
I was immediately reminded of a rainy night in Portland some 15 years earlier…
[CUE FLASHBACK MUSIC]
Actually, it wasn’t even Portland. It was Milwaukie, a suburb in Clackamas County. God, the spelling of that name bugged me, and this was long before I ever dreamt I’d one day live in Wisconsin. There oughtta be a rule: I before E, except after MILWAUK.
But I digress.
That night in 2010, my then-girlfriend and I went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant in the aforementioned unoriginally named and poorly spelled suburb–and when the server plopped my margarita down in front of me, it too had a little cocktail umbrella. Afterward, as we made our way across the parking lot in the pouring rain, I opened up that tiny paper umbrella to shield us from the deluge as we dashed to the car. Ha-ha, right? Such a Mark thing to do. She laughed, I laughed. End of story, right?
Wrong. Because I committed the ultimate sin of blogging about it.
That girlfriend was extremely private. Like, witness-protection-program private. And even though I never mentioned her name, the name of the restaurant, or even the name of the goofy-ass suburb, that blog post led to a huge fight, one that ultimately contributed to our demise as a couple. She asked me to delete it, but I refused. She complained that I’d taken an intimate moment and shared it with the whole world.
Guys…I didn’t have nearly the blog following I do today. Five people commented on that post. The earth’s population was 7 billion in 2010. This means I shared our date with 0.0000000007% of the world.
(One of those five people who commented was Tara. I love that!)
Does her reaction seem a tad extreme? Well, it turns out there was a reason for that: unbeknownst to me, she was married.
[CUE DRAMATIC MUSIC]
I knew she had been married, as in past tense, as in once upon a time, but she’d told me they were divorced. And she was living in a big ol’ house in that goofy-ass suburb all by herself, so why would I doubt her? It’s not like I ever opened a closet door or peaked under the bed and found another man there. That’s because he was living in Las Vegas. Alrighty, then…so, maybe not the most traditional marriage in the world, but a marriage nonetheless! I guess he was planning on moving into the big ol’ house in the goofy suburb, but she kept putting him off because…me.
Look, I get that I’m irresistible, but the whole thing turns my stomach. I was The Other Man without knowing there was Another Man.
Welp, she wasn’t just a cheater; she was paranoid, convinced that her husband would see the completely anonymous blog post, read between the lines, and know that she was stepping out on him. So, she bailed a couple of weeks after the paper umbrella incident, moving to Nevada to be with him full-time while concocting some totally made-up story for me. I never saw her again, though there were occasional phone calls for a few months afterward. It would take me two and a half years to uncover the truth. If I hadn’t stumbled upon her obituary in 2013, I’d probably still be clueless.
Pro tip: if you want your deepest, darkest secrets to stay hidden, don’t die.
(I don’t mean to sound callous. I feel terrible that she passed away so young, and even though she done me wrong, she done him wronger. Her pathological lies caused a lot of hurt and pain after she was gone. There’s a LOT more to this real-life soap opera, but I’ve dredged up enough of the sordid past for today.)
I was sharing this story with Tara while eating my enchiladas, but of course she was familiar with most of it already. My wife, after all, was one of the 0.0000000007% who read my original blog post. Unlike the ex-GF, we have no secrets.
“So, if it were raining when we left, and I tried to keep us dry with this flimsy little cocktail umbrella, would you laugh?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she replied.
“And if I blogged about it afterward, would you get mad?”
“Babe, I’d get mad if you didn’t blog about it.”
Night and day, guys. Which is why, despite the negative associations, I’ll always be happy to see a miniature umbrella in my drink: it’s metaphorical, if not physical, proof that you can always weather the storm. Longfellow wrote, Into each life, a little rain must fall…but there are brighter days ahead if you know where to look.
Mark My Words 
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