Another Answer....

Here's a quick answer to another question from Ask Me Anything!:

How did you and The Wife meet?

We were in the band together in college. She played the oboe; I played the trumpet. It's not like we sat next to each other in the band or anything, but I didn't "meet" her in the sense of thinking, "Hmmmm, I should ask her out" until halfway through my sophomore year. We were both good friends with a third party, who went with my roommate and I to the local bar to celebrate his birthday that year. (This was February 1991.) The Future Wife came along for the ride. After a few hours of drinks and bar food, everyone else went to the dance floor. Not being a dance floor type, I stayed at the table to continue my assault on a pitcher of Bud Light. And the Future Wife stayed as well, to my surprise.

A few days later, I asked her out. Our first date was to go see Edward Scissorhands. We talked a bit beforehand, liked the movie, talked a bit afterward, went on our way. We didn't hold hands or kiss or anything like that. I wanted there to be a second date, but I wasn't sure she felt the same way. Turned out she did; another mutual friend (later the Maid of Honor at our wedding) told me so. We somehow ended up hanging out together the next night. And the night after. And the night after that.

Other stuff about our early relationship? Let's see -- she turned 21 just a few days after we started dating, so I had a steady source of alcohol until I turned 21 myself a year and a half later. When she met me, she had never seen a single Star Wars movie. Having grown up in a family of farmers (though she didn't grow up on an actual farm, I think), she knew a lot of stuff that I had no idea whatsoever about, and she used to derive great amusement from my inability to distinguish chickens from turkeys. (I got better.) She drove herself to New York to spend a week with me that subsequent summer. When we'd been dating about a year and a half, I bought her her first pair of overalls. (God, she looked cute that night.) She stayed in Iowa when I graduated, while I moved home. We were apart for nine months. That sucked. She moved to New York in 1994, with the help of myself and my parents in getting her stuff out of Iowa. We continued to date. And date. And date. Many nights spent at a bar called the Bird Cage, drinking and eating chicken wings. In 1996 -- I can't remember the date -- she proposed to me, but in my defense, had JCPenney actually had the damn ring in the right size the day before instead of having to special order it which took an extra two weeks, I would have proposed to her. When I went to pick up the ring, somehow JCPenney misplaced the paperwork, and some poor clerk spent his entire lunch hour looking for it. And I've just now realized that I never wrote a letter to thank the guy. Shit.

Anyway, that's how we started dating. I'm not sure when, or even if, we actually "met". Do we ever actually remember meeting the most important people in our lives?