You snooze, you lose!

Pizza was Mark’s major food group.  He said he could eat pizza every day for the rest of his life and he would never get tired of it.  I thought he was joking.  He wasn’t!  When he died, his phone had 65 names in the directory, 20 of them were pizza places.  One particular night, before we were engaged, we went to a movie and then to Pizza Hut at around 10:00 pm.  We had our pizza and our visit and then we went out to his car and sat before he took me home.  We laughed and laughed.  It was freezing in his non-heated car so I was under the blanket and he was in his usual short sleeve shirt without a jacket sitting next to me.  For those of you that know me, I love sleeping.  From what Emilie and Mark always tell me, it is some sort of gift to cover myself with a blanket and within seconds be sound asleep.  I guess that’s what happened in this case.  I leaned on Mark, he put his arm around me and I fell asleep.  He didn’t want to wake me up to drive me home so he sat there, and sat there, and sat there.  I slept.  Eventually, I guess, he fell asleep too.  I woke up at some point, and realized where I was.  My neck was kinked funny.  I sat up, looked at my watch and saw it said 3:40 AM!!!!  I screamed, woke Mark up and said “It’s 3:45 AM!  My parents are gonna kill me!”  (This was the age before cell phones).  So Mark quickly drove me home.  We got out of the car and started walking toward the carport.  I was scared!  We almost made it to the porch when all of a sudden the light in the carport came on.  Mark let go of my hand and turned around and RAN!!  Yes, he ran to his car faster than I had ever seen him move, not looking back once or even shouting “goodnight!”  By the time my mother opened the door, Mark was driving away at warp-speed.  My mom said, “I thought I would hurry you up a little.”  When I got in the door, I heard the onslaught of rage and worry from my poor mother (all while thinking that Mark was going to hear every last second of this when I saw him again…if I saw him again!!!)  I did, at one point, have to contain my laughter when my mother said, “it only takes 20 minutes to make a baby, you know.”  And I thought, “wow, that’s not what I heard.”  But I decided not to say that out loud.  The next day, my father told me about how his sons would never bring a girl home that late and he was not going to allow Mark to come over or date me anymore.  I apologized profusely and kept thinking about Mark getting out of all this reprimand.  I tried to explain that we just fell asleep but they didn’t seem to believe me.  A few months earlier, I was standing in the same spot trying to convince myself to go out with him on a third date, and now I was falling in love with him, begging my parents for another chance.  Anyway, it was settled that if we continued to see each other, we would have an 11:00 pm curfew.  I was 19 and Mark was 19 and he hadn’t had a curfew in his life so this was an interesting lesson for both of us.  I remember whenever we chose movies to watch, the starting and ending time was how we chose from that point on.  Mark grumbled and complained about it, but we were careful not to mess up again.  I’m not sure if I ever saw Mark run again after that, at least not with any speed.  Our future would have many more nights of him holding me while I slept, but we would just have to wait a little while longer for that.