An Ending and a Beginning

Epilogue:

Now you may be thinking, "Let bygones be bygones and all's well that ends well." and you would not be completely wrong. Annie and I did decide that we would not waste our time and energy staying angry with those two; we would rather enjoy our lives together. For the most part, we were even able to be in the same room with them without any rancor or animosity building, although we never made a habit of it. However, that same forgiveness did not extend for The Troll and Dark Tooth.

About six months after the divorces were final, Annie and I were sitting in that same restaurant that is attached to that same hotel where Bill and Cheryl used to spend their Thursday afternoons when who do you think sits down at the table next to us? Right the first time! It was Dark Tooth and The Troll. They didn't know us, so we continued to enjoy our lunch while listening to the conversation at the next table. I might have been able to let it go, until we heard Dark Tooth refer to her husband as "clueless" and The Troll called his wife "predictable". That did not sit well with us.

After they left the restaurant and walked into the hotel, Annie and I paid our bill, got into our car, and headed north to a little house we knew from a video we once watched. As we knocked on the door and heard footsteps coming, Annie turned to me and said, "Burn the bitch!" Well, I did tell you that we both have a vindictive streak.

For reasons that now seem almost alien to me, both Annie and I carried a memory stick in our cars with copies of a few choice videos on it and one of those videos was the foursome. We wanted to forgive, but we were never inclined to forget. It turned out that Dark Tooth's husband's name is Henry and he found our little video from the previous summer to be most interesting. As with Annie, the news did not seem to come as a complete surprise to Henry. He also knew The Troll. Better than that, he knew The Troll's wife. We left him with a copy of the video and the advice that a wife is better able to extract revenge than a jealous husband and that it wasn't worth him going to jail over the two cheaters.

About two months later we got a letter in the mail that contained a clipping from a paper in a small town not too far north of us. It seems that a gentleman there, who the paper described as "stocky", was having a nasty run of bad luck; his wife was divorcing him, his girlfriend had gone to live with her sister, and he had been brutally mugged one night while visiting the big city. The mugger not only took his wallet, but he took a baseball bat to both his knees before hitting a home run with his balls.

"It's sad when bad things happen to good people." At least, that's what I think Annie said. She was laughing too hard to be intelligible. Later that night she said to me, "You know my friend Helen? She is a huge baseball fan. We should introduce her to Henry." There's that giggle again! God I love that giggle.

The following summer the senior coed softball league in a town not far north of here found two new members, each with a lifelong love of the game. I know they don't have this problem in the big leagues, but you must admit that the rule about "No Kissing in the Dugout!" was just made to be broken.