You read about and hear all the time about the husband who comes home unexpectedly, or shows up some place where he's not supposed to be, and sees his wife doing something he wasn't supposed to see.
You always think it's going to happen to someone else, until that fateful moment when it happens to you.
I wasn't supposed to come home from that particular business trip until mid-afternoon on Saturday, but here it was Friday night, and I was slumped on a stool in the bar of a suburban dance club in my home city.
I was watching my wife of 21 years and some man I'd never seen before cutting a rug like they were long-lost lovers. They were part of a larger group that I assumed were people from Susan's workplace.
Let me back up a second. Susan and this other guy didn't look quite like lovers, but there was a little too much familiarity, a little too much flirting for it to be completely innocent.
I'm a great believer in the old adage, "where there's smoke, there's fire." And my wife and this fellow, who looked to be about the same age as she and I, were creating what appeared to me to be an awful lot of smoke.
I could smell trouble brewing, and I didn't like it one bit.
Before I got too far into this, I suppose this is a good time to introduce myself and my lovely wife.
I was born in October of 1960, and my full honest-to-God given name is Hans Deiter McDonald, and when I was a kid I'd punch anyone who called me that.
My name arises out my mom's very sad history, and while I have grown to accept it, now that I know that history, I've been called Dutch for so long that it's really irrelevant.
My dad, Kenneth McDonald, met my mother when he was stationed in Germany with the Army around 1956. Mom was part of the steno pool, because she spoke and wrote perfect English, and Daddy was the company clerk to which she was assigned.
The happy part of my parents' story is that they fell head over heels in love, got married and she came with Daddy when he returned to the States. They remained deeply in love right up to the day my mother finally succumbed to cancer in 1997.
It's not hard to imagine why Daddy was smitten with my mother. She was beautiful, with sandy blonde hair, classic Teutonic features, big brown eyes and a figure that was close to being statuesque.
Daddy was also good-looking and powerfully built, although he was actually an inch or so shorter than she was. He had dark red hair and the open ruddy features of the Scotsman. Needless to say, they made quite a couple.
No one ever talked much about my mother's background, so it wasn't until she was on her deathbed that I finally heard the story behind my name. She sat me down on the bed in my parents' bedroom about six weeks before she died and told me the saddest tale you can imagine.
By a cruel twist of irony, my mom was born Birgit Schilling in Berlin on Jan. 30, 1933. If you know your history, you will know that was the very same day that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Needless to say, Mom's birthday was never celebrated in our house with any enthusiasm.
Her father – Hans – was drafted into the Wehrmacht at the start of World War II and was killed in the Ukraine in the fall of 1942. Considering what happened to his unit – they were annihilated at Stalingrad the following winter – he was probably one of the luckier ones.
Mom, her mother and her little brother – Dieter – managed to survive in Berlin as the war turned bad for Germany, and it looked like they might make it to the end.
But one afternoon in early April of 1945, Mom was sent to the market, and while she was gone their neighborhood came under attack from Russian artillery. When Mom returned from the market, all that was left of their apartment building was a pile of smoking rubble.
There had been no warning, and no one who had been in the building – including her mother and brother – had made it out alive.
Now, Mom was a smart girl. She had heard the stories about what the Russians were doing to German women in the towns they captured, and she knew that a pretty 12-year-old orphan would have no chance in their clutches.
She never hesitated and she never looked back. She took off with just the clothes on her back, her little purse with her ID, some photographs and few worthless marks, and the meager food she'd just bought from the market. She walked to the west – followed the sun, as she put it – managing to sneak through what was left of the German frontline, until she came to a British Army unit.
The Tommies got her safely to the Red Cross, who put her into an orphanage in Bonn, and she managed to rebuild her life. There she learned how to speak and write English.
Mom was a strong woman of impeccable character, but she never really got the chance to grieve for her mother and her brother, and there were always those odd moments when she would dissolve into tears, seemingly over nothing. She'd leave the room, stay behind the closed door to her bedroom for awhile, then come out later with her composure restored.
To my knowledge, my mother never absolutely insisted on getting her way in anything. Growing up in Hitler's Germany will do that to a person. But she absolutely insisted on naming her first son after her father and her brother, and Dad never put up the first objection.
But my Pappa McDonald had served in the Navy in the war, on anti-submarine patrol in the Atlantic, and while he had the utmost respect for my mother, and was quite fond of her, he had a little trouble accepting a grandson named Hans. So he called me Dutch, and it stuck (thank God).
Of course, inevitably some schoolyard joker would call me Hans, and we'd argue, then we'd fight. Until about the seventh grade, it wasn't certain whether I'd ever amount to anything in school, because I spent so much time in detention for fighting.
