Revolving Doors

Introduction

Final Encounters

After five long years of marriage, my wife Joan and I were going through a divorce. As she’d tell everyone, “The honeymoon was over when the honeymoon was over.” I met Joan in 1988. We were married in 1990 and divorced by 1995.  Joan now lived with her new boyfriend while I sat alone in my kitchen with Sandy, my golden retriever, lying loyally on the floor beside my chair.

On this particular cold, overcast Saturday afternoon, during the infamous separation period, Sandy and I were waiting nervously for Joan’s next visit. Sandy looked at me with sympathetic and comforting eyes, seeming to understand how my anxiety was growing moment by moment.

Joan always arrived nearly on time. The trouble was I just didn’t know who would be arriving. Would it be the wife who said she understood our failed marriage was all her fault and would only take what she moved in with? Or would it be her dark, bipolar side that promised to take me to court and fight for everything, even threatening to dig up the landscaping we planted together around the house?

The doorbell rang. As Joan entered the house and walked toward me, I quickly realized this wasn’t going to be a pleasant visit. Even though she left me a week before Christmas, she had still decorated the house, sent out the Christmas cards, and prepared a great holiday dinner the day before she moved out. The very next day, she and the new love of her of life, Donald, had rented a truck. While I was at work, they backed the truck into the driveway and loaded it up with half of our belongings so they could begin their new life together. Early that afternoon, in a panic, an elderly neighbor called me at my office to tell me that Joan was emptying the house. Joan had alienated herself from this and other neighbors, as well as family, and friends over the previous few years.

After taking almost everything from the house with her that day, she still eyed something new to claim on each visit. On previous visits, she had already taken the coffeemaker, espresso machine, pasta and dough machines, silverware, dinner plates, and pots and pans.

“What was it going to be this time?” I thought.

This time, as Joan approached me in the kitchen, she glanced around the living and dining rooms for something else to claim. She stopped in front of the dining room table.

“Take down that dining room chandelier for me!” she demanded.

I paused a moment, dumbstruck. I thought, “Enough is finally enough.”

I calmly replied, “No.”

Standing just a few feet from where I was now standing at the kitchen counter, Joan began to raise her voice.

“Take it down!” she insisted in a shrill pitch. “None of this is rightfully yours. We’ll see what the lawyer says.”

It is amazing how someone’s expectations rise dramatically after seeing a divorce lawyer. Sandy, still lying at my side on the kitchen floor, rose and began walking slowly toward Joan. As Sandy approached Joan, she stopped and stood between Joan and me. Then she began to bark. Now, for a golden retriever to bark was one thing, but to be a protecting guard dog was quite another surprise.

Joan asked, “Why is Sandy barking at me? Vince, what’s the matter with Sandy?”

As her voice grew panicky, Joan began to nervously back up, stepping backward into the front hallway with Sandy advancing forward and heading toward her step by step. Astonished, I rose and proudly followed behind Miss Sandy as Joan backed into the foyer. Joan continued to move backward toward the front door of the house. Sandy, still barking, was now standing at my side.

Joan now had a very frightened look on her face. “Vince, what’s wrong with the dog?”

I calmly but smugly replied, “I think you better leave.”

I didn’t want to show my pride after discovering my new guardian but it was then I realized my complete admiration and love for this animal. Sandy sensed my pain and tried to help me deal with it in her own way.

You’d think that getting married at the age of thirty-five, after dating and evaluating numerous women over many years, I’d finally find the woman of my dreams, the perfect woman I’d live happily ever after with. For me, I believed it was Joan. Well, things didn’t go exactly as planned.

A friend once said to me after his marriage failed, “You sure don’t know someone until after you have lived with them.”

This had to be one of the most infamous understatements of all times, specifically in my life and probably many others. I had always been told to make sure you meet the family as soon as you start dating someone. My mistake was I didn’t meet Joan’s parents and brothers until after we’d been engaged. It was then I quickly understood why she’d run away to join the army on the day she t