A BLIND DATE in APPALACHIA

A BLIND DATE in APPALACHIA

By Kristin Fellows



I arrived in Asheville, a small town in the mountains of Western North Carolina, a divorced mom with two kids – one in high school and one in college. It took me awhile to realize that my prospects for finding a boyfriend here were pretty slim. According to Kiplinger, Asheville ranks among the ten worst cities for singles in the US.

I knew just what I was looking for. Having lived in London as a kid, worked in Paris as a teenager, and traveled throughout much of Europe for work as an adult, I was on the lookout for an international boyfriend, someone to learn different languages from and have travel adventures with now that my kids were nearly launched.

Asheville attracts an interesting mix of people, but eight years had passed with nothing more than a handful of dates and a few relationships that didn't last past a month or two.

And then fate intervened unexpectedly in the form of a tall, German, rugby-playing architect with a gray ponytail named Jo. Jo was in charge of landscaping at the Retirement Home for Methodist Missionaries, which was located across the street from my house in my mixed-use downtown neighborhood. For the past year, Jo and I had waved to one another occasionally or spent a few moments chatting about gardening. Or house design. Or Germany.

One day, on a whim, I asked him if he had any single friends.

"No," he said smugly in his strong German accent. "Ve're all taken!"

I immediately regretted having asked.

Several weeks later, however, he came striding across the street as I was pulling my car into the driveway.

"Okay," he said, not wasting any time with greetings. "I thought of someone!"

Surprised, I agreed to meet that "someone" without pausing to wonder why it had taken him a month to come up with this guy.

"When are you going to Spain?" Jo asked.

I had told him of my upcoming trip to Barcelona which had been planned with my Chinese horoscope in mind – a horoscope that promised those born in the year of the Monkey would find true love sometime in the last quarter of the year of the Snake.

Accordingly, I had changed my booking from July to late September, thinking I might help things along by putting myself in the perfect location to meet an adventurous, handsome Catalan. For a whole week, I had plans to do nothing but walk the city, experience the food and wine and people, take photographs on the streets, and hopefully meet the man of my dreams.

I didn’t reveal any of this to Jo, of course. I gave him the date of my return and he said he would arrange the blind date for the following night.

I loved my week in Barcelona. I thought I would be photographing Gaudi architecture, but instead I found myself drawn to photographing people in love. And they were everywhere: eyeing on another on the street, reading books together while lying in the grass outside the airport, kissing passionately across tiny tables in outside cafés with half-finished coffees pushed aside, reading their mobile phones while lying on the stone sidewalk outside a shop, pausing as they walked across a square for a passionate embrace, and staring into one another’s eyes over glasses of wine on a darkened balcony at night. Even the dogs seemed to be in love.

But, alas, not me. I did meet a lovely waiter named Pablo on my last night in Barcelona at the restaurant just down the stairs and outside the flat where I was staying which, two glasses of wine later, might have turned into something interesting. But it didn’t.

Despite my Chinese horoscope, I returned home with more than 900 photographs, but no boyfriend.

Re-entry is always tough for me. It was a 23-hour journey back to Asheville. I spent much of the five-hour layover at JFK pondering this upcoming blind date and wondering how I could get out of it. But I had neither Jo’s phone number nor the name or number of my prospective blind date.

Doing the math on the long night drive from Charlotte Airport back up into the mountains, I decided the chances this would turn out to be something interesting were less than zero. Probably lower. I arrived home exhausted in the wee hours of the morning of the blind date and crawled into bed wishing I’d never agreed to it.

Late that afternoon, two hours before the blind date, Jo appeared on my front porch to tell me my date's name and the location of our dinner. In honor of my trip to Barcelona, he’d picked Curaté, a wonderful Spanish tapas restaurant downtown. Of course, that’s all I’d been eating the past week, but it was a sweet thought, nonetheless. Jo also told me I would be able to identify my date by the rugby shirt he would be wearing.

Really, a rugby shirt, at Curaté? I wondered. I doubted they’d even let him in but kept my misgivings to myself. If they turned him away, great. Problem solved.

Massively jetlagged, I dragged myself and my bad attitude through pre-date preparations with only a bare minimum of attention given to makeup and hair before heading downtown. Thankfully, it was less than ten minutes away.

I arrived at the front door of the restaurant at the exact same moment a pleasant looking man also got there, coming from the opposite direction. Even before I saw the rugby shirt under his sports jacket, I knew it was him.

He was smiling at me.

That evening, sitting side by side, while the chefs provided us with dish after dish of deliciousness, we talked for nearly four hours. I discovered he wasn't German or European, he was a fifth-generation Appalachian. He had the complexion of someone with Scottish roots, not Mediterranean. He did have an accent, however – a Southern one.

I also discovered the time I spent at the airport inventing excuses to get out of a second date, was entirely wasted.