How I Met Your Mother

  Hollywood probably won’t pick up on our story, because we didn’t come together to get laid.  We came together to make a life.   We met each other 20 years ago this past September, although, maybe it would be more accurate to say that she met me. During our first encounter together, she walked away thinking of me as the exotic country boy from Tillsonburg.  After that first week at the University of Guelph, I merely remembered her as a vaguely familiar and pretty face.  

  She had never heard of Tillsonburg before, but that long haired, country boy had been spinning the tobacco town tale on his turntable.  That is where her first memories of me begin; listening to me playing Stompin Tom Connors from my small university residence room.

  I first remember seeing her standing in line at the Mountain cafeteria.  At that point, I only knew I had seen her somewhere before.  I also knew that she was standing behind me.  Besides being familiar, she was also very pretty.  I remember her smiling at me when our eyes met, and it wasn’t the kind of alluring or captivating smile that a poet would write about.  It was the kind of smile that exudes from an authentically happy heart.

   This is the scene which has set the stage for the rest of our lives.  I wasn’t in the pizza line because I was hoping to find someone.  I was waiting for pizza because I was hungry.   I couldn’t see myself standing in the very moment which would change the course of my life for the better.  I simply saw the opportunity to ask a pretty girl to have supper with me and my friends, and for the moment, that is where I left it.

  She must have read a lot of books about ‘How To Get A Guy’, because in the weeks that followed, she demonstrated both the resolve an tenacity of a skilled hunter.  Either that, or she was a natural born man killer.  I am not sure which.  Whether by training or instinct, she regularly appeared in my room, pretending to ask my roommate for help with her calculus.

  There really was no hope of escape for me.  Besides being resolved and tenacious, she was also very cunning, calculated and methodical.  She had studied her prey, knowing my schedule and eating habits.  I know this now, but at the time, I believed it merely coincidence that she happened to show up at the places I ate each day.  The thought never occurred to me that she might have been interested in me.  I was becoming acutely aware however, that I most definitely did like her.

   It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know much about womanizing, because I probably would have found a very different kind of woman, and that is a thought I find to be completely unbearable, even tormenting.  We carried on this way for a few weeks.  Morning after morning, as I drowned my waffles in syrup, she was there.  Maybe that’s how relationships are meant to grow.  Maybe being there for, and with a person is the most fertile ground there is, since I found myself hoping, day after day that she would be there for me in the next.

   I find myself thinking the same still today, hoping, day after day that she will be there with me, and I with her in the next.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s bad to continue to ask God for more, to see her in another day, and yet again tomorrow. 

 How many tomorrows can I have?  I’ll take them all.