Love Story

A bit back Evie posted her love story at a Road Less Traveled. I meant to post ours here too, but it got away from me.

Ours is pretty simple. We were teenagers. :)

The first time I met Dearest it was a bit unusual. I had just moved to Iowa from Illinois and felt really out of place. I drove around sometimes just getting the feel of the new place. There was a high school DJ'd radio station and one night I heard the strangest combination of songs......
Violent Femmes, Benny Goodman, and TMBG mixed with some Christian punk. ??? I had to meet the DJ.

So I drove to the station and walked in. That's the first time I met Dearest. He was polite and sweet, but very busy.

The next time, I was eating beef jerky at the high school voc-tech campus and he thought that was pretty cool. Girls don't usually eat beef jerky?

The next time, (sense a pattern?) it was at a punk show. Still, I thought he was sweet and really cute but my life had gotten quite crazy by then.

Finally, I ended up in the program that ran the radio station and he spent a lot of time there too. He was reading a J. D. Salinger book that was not Catcher in the Rye (at the time I thought I was the only person on earth who knew Salinger wrote other books......) and we struck up a conversation.

So then we were friends. That was about it. Friends. Then good friends. Then good friends who spent a lot of time together.

One night he called me at 11 PM and invited me to go fishing. It was the end of my sister day with Aunt Bee so I asked if she could come along, explaining a bit about sister day. Aunt Bee was bitter and 11 years old, but said yes too. She wanted to ride in his very cool VW Bug.

We headed off for fishing in the moonlight. No fish were caught. In fact Aunt Bee threw rocks at Dearest and pouted the whole time. She tried to fish and ended up losing some of his best lures. The funny thing is, after the excursion she said, "You'll never date him." Why? "He's cute and nice and you only date losers." Thanks Aunt Bee. (BTW, I never dated another loser again in my life. Also, ha ha. I married the cute and nice guy AB threw rocks at!)

Back to the story at hand-
Still, we were not ready. Suddenly we were good friends who were not dating anyone else. Then good friends who secretly had crushes on the other but didn't want to mess with the friendship and then......

Then one night he showed up at the bookstore where I worked. At closing, he asked if I had ever seen the badminton sculpture at the KC Art Museum. No? Ok, let's go. Tonight?

It was a blizzard in December, we left Iowa at 1 AM for KC. Nuts, I know. We had a blast. Two days of art museum bliss, meeting his friends and family, eating at some neat places.

When it was all said and done and he dropped me off at home, he said, "You are beautiful." Then he left. He left me speechless. I was in shock. He was messing with our friendship! Part of me was scared and the other absolutely gleeful. This is a photo of me the next day.

I showed up at his work and invited him over to watch movies. That December was a whirlwind.

Christmas Eve, 1996 we kissed for the first time. That was it. We began our life together.