I am not sure who I am writing this for. This started as my nostalgic focus as my baby boy turns 4 years old and proclaims he is not a baby any more. I digressed into the memory of all of my children as babies… then thoughts of life before babies… then life before we were married. How does life move this fast? I guess I am really writing for myself and my sanity. I was never very good about keeping a journal, and I failed at scrapbooking miserably, though I still have some fantasies of catching up quickly with digital scrapbooking.
Anyway… Our Journey…It seems like we somehow just snapped our fingers and… Poof… we were in this chaos of a family of six. John and I started dating about 20 years ago, and we have never stopped running on the treadmill of life. I have always thought " after this next phase… things will slow down, and we stop and enjoy life". All of the sudden, twenty years later, that first phase seems so slow and peaceful, though at the time we thought we were soooo… busy. What I thought was busy then was not so busy at all, looking back.
I thought I had surely paid my dues when I was all of 26 years old. I thought that the hardest work I would ever do was behind me. Man, how stupid I must have sounded! I remember a cousin of my dad's who is a prominent attorney calling me on it. He is a very successful attorney with his own firm in Houston. He speaks Russian, and has done business internationally. He has 3 kids, including twins, who are grown, and still works very hard. I was newly married, about 5 years out of college, and was working as a restaurant manager at la Madeleine, where I believed I was very important. I naively commented that I had paid my dues (in the first couple of years after college), and he laughed – how stupid this must have sounded to someone who had been working hard for some 40 years! My life was only beginning. I had worked a lot of grueling hours and had done some very hard work, and I thought I was done! This would surely be the toughest part of my life. Ha!
Back to our Journey…John and I…We met in college at a Steve Miller Band concert in Oklahoma City. I was with my girlfriends, and he was with a group of guys that one of the girls I was with knew from high school. It was a very brief meeting, pretty uneventful for both of us. We were invited to meet this group later, but for a reason I cannot recall, we never went to the meeting location. That was it. It was just a blip in a fun summer of parties and fun. As the fall semester started at OSU (Oklahoma State University), somehow it came up in a conversation with my roommate, Amy, that I had met this person John. She knew him from Student Government, which I had no interest in, and that was the end of the conversation. She asked me a few questions about it, and that was it. She was like that… she always asked a lot of questions. She was just a thinker… always thinking…because that is what thinkers do!
About Amy (she was a key player in this journey):
My friend Amy was (and still is) a very smart, very motivated individual. She is one of the smartest people I know. She took Chinese classes at OSU (which was very unusual). She speaks Chinese, and went to school in China for a semester in college, just because she is smart and she had this vision of Chinese being an asset in her future. I remember that my goal in life at the time was to major in Hotel and Restaurant Management, with a minor in Spanish, because I thought it would be fun to work in Barcelona at the Olympics. Never mind that the Olympics was only one summer, and that I had no goals beyond that. I am not sure why I chose the Olympics, as I was not even really a big sports fan. I met a girl from my sorority at a school in Kansas (K-State) who was also majoring in Hospitality, and I think we cooked up this goal to go to Barcelona. She got married after college though, and I needed a "real" job, so my dad told me, so the dream of the Olympics went to the wayside. I thought the fact that I had a goal was commendable – it is a little laughable to me now.
Amy came to OSU from University of North Carolina, and had gone to a private girl's school in high school. I had also gone to a private girl's school – though mine was a boarding school - Hockaday, and there were some behavior issues that landed me there, plus, my parents divorced when I was in 8th grade, and I couldn't really find my happy place after that. Boarding school was actually the best thing I ever did. I didn't really acknowledge any of this in college, because the sorority might not have wanted me if they knew I had spent a night in the juvi in Pawhuska for stealing signs with my friends (funny story I will elaborate on later). Anyway, Amy and I connected through this common thread of perceived intellect and prominence of girl's school graduates. We were not quite as peppy as a lot of the girls in our sorority, and we just clicked. The difference was that Amy was really an intellectual, and I was not at all. She was also very interested in politics, and I really had no concept of this. I was in awe of her intelligence.
I think she must have thought I was as smart as she was when we met. Actually, I was reasonably smart, but just not very motivated or mature at the time. She must have been so disappointed when she realized that I was in college for fun, and was not terribly driven as a student. Anyway, Amy tried to motivate me academically, and she also tried to drag me along in her effort to network. I was not mature and didn't really understand networking. I just sort of wandered where the action lead me, with no real plan in mind. You could say I was a follower. I was not a crazy partier at all, but I enjoyed being social, certainly much more than I enjoyed studying.
So how was Amy involved in this journey of mine? Amy was my roommate at the time. We had different circles of friends, but we really clicked for some reason. I don't even remember who I was dating or interested in at the time, but I recall that Amy did not necessarily approve. All of the sudden, Amy started coming home, telling me of this guy in her student government office that was asking about me. She talked about this a lot. In another world – John's world, there was this friend of John's, Chris telling him that I was asking about John a lot. The truth is that our meeting during the summer had been very brief and not that memorable. I remember that he was sunburned, and with a guy named Graydon that I knew through a home town connection, and that is about it. I am sure his memory of me was about the same. We really knew nothing of each other. For some reason though, Amy and Chris decided to become matchmakers, and continued this plot.
On October 10, 1989, the night of my 22nd birthday, just after I returned to the sorority house from going out to dinner with my dad, I received a call from a guy named John. It started a little awkward. We didn't really know each other, and I was not expecting his call. Then, he asked what I was doing and I said it was my birthday, and all of the sudden he felt like he had missed my day, but really we didn't know each other so how would he have known it was my birthday. We talked for a while, and made plans for a date on October 12.
On October 12, we had our first date. There were a few coincidences that were chilling. First, over dinner, I learned that John grew up in Pawnee, Oklahoma, a town only about 40 miles from my home town. Next, John went away to a military school in Indiana for high school. In small town Oklahoma, this is a pretty rare coincidence. We grew up only a few miles from each other, then we both went away to boarding school, then we both end up at a college which is an agriculture school in the middle of Oklahoma, where the population of people who went to boarding school was very small. I never met anyone else in college who had this experience. It was an amazing coincidence – gave me chills! After dinner, we went to a movie at our college town theatre, which at the time likely only had 2 movies playing at the same time. We selected a movie by the name of Dead Poets Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Poets_Society) because Robin Williams was in it. I don't think either of us knew much about the movie… then as luck would have it, the movie was about a boarding school. What are the chances of that? Though this was a first date, and we barely knew each other, I felt incredibly connected to this guy -- This unknown guy who I had been set up with, though at the moment, we had not figured out the scheme of Amy and Chris.
John and I started dating at that point, and spending a lot of time together. In fact, this would be the semester in which I made the lowest grades ever. I would watch John Wayne movies or football games with him until late at night at his fraternity house, even though I had no interest in these things and I had a 7:30 am class the next day. I was in lala land for sure. Life was a blur from October until Christmas that year, and when my grades arrived during the Christmas break, I was in so much trouble.
We continued to date through the next couple of years of college, with no clear plans for a future together, but we had a great time, and just took it day by day. Neither of us was into planning at that point. I graduated a semester before him, and he had no clue what his plans were, so to proove that I didn't need a man, I accepted a job which lead me to St. Louis, Missouri, where I would be far away from this man... and I hated it! Subsequently, John graduated and went to graduate school in Houston, Texas. We were now over 20 hours away from each other and it was no fun.
He started sending me the classified ads for jobs in Houston --remember when we had to cut ads from the newspaper, and send our resumes through the mail? I accepted a job in Houston and started to make plans to move less than a year after moving to St. Louis. I still told myself that I was moving because of a fabulous job, and not because of a boy / man! I fooled nobody! While he was attending school, I was working very hard as a manager for a new restaurant group -- la Madeleine. He finished school, started working, and we were engaged a little while after that. By that time we had been dating close to 5 years. We were married in 1994, and I started my graduate school after a year. When I was almost finished, John announced that he was applying to law school. Yeah... we would be paying for college forever!
Posts
