Love at First Sight

April 23, 1993

I had just come home from writing my last exam after my third year of university. I was tired and had a splitting headache but my friend Michele and I had made plans to go out and celebrate and she was not going to let me out of them. "Take an advil, I'll be there in an hour."

Our first stop was the Lone Star for dinner. Our initial plan was to head upstairs for a few beers and dancing but when we reached the lounge we realized that it was line-dancing night and those people took line-dancing very, very seriously. After a few attempts we realized we were out of our depth and decided to head down to the market. There was a bar where we had played pool the previous week and we decided to check it out again.

The place was slow to start. We had a beer and chatted until the DJ started to play some good tunes. We had not been dancing for long when a group of guys approached us. They were great: polite, a lot of fun, good dancers and so much nicer than the crowd at the country bar. About an hour later I excused myself to grab a beer and came back to the dance floor. I was looking for my girlfriend when a guy popped up in front of me. He had a great smile with a dimple on his cheek and when he looked at me everything around me stopped for a second.

I was not looking to meet anyone that night. I had just got out of a long-term relationship and my heart was still pretty fragile. I wanted to be single for a while and figure out what I was going to do with my future but the guy with the smile was all I could think about. A voice in the back of my head said: this is the man you are going to marry.

I dismissed it. There was no such thing as love at first sight. Sure, this guy was good looking, well-built and had a killer smile but I had taken myself off the market. He grabbed my hand and pulled me to a quieter spot to introduce himself. His name was Paul, he was in the army and he was 25. You can't be too careful when you meet a guy in a bar so I asked for I.D. -- his name was in fact Raymond but he goes by his middle name and he had a scar on his right shin according to the military ID that I had to ask about. He was a good sport and that smile was melting a hole in my heart so I agreed to go for coffee with him if he bought me a piece of pie. My girlfriend had be-friended one of his buddies so off we went.

As we walked to the cafe he told me it had started out as a bad night: he had ripped his jeans and lost a contact but he was happy with how it was turning out. I scrawled my phone number on the back of an ATM receipt with my lipstick and he promised he would call 2 days later.

The next day I thought about him a lot. He was in the army -- I NEVER dated military guys. He lived in Germany but he planned to be posted here soon. He was separated and had a child -- definitely too much baggage. He did not fit any of the criteria that I was looking for so why did I jump every time the phone rang.

He called on Sunday as promised. He had already bought a map and planned a route to my house. As we sat there that night drinking coffee and eating wings I don't know if he would have believed that we would end up here 17 years later: married, a house, three children, a grandson.
But, here we are. Ginger it has been a crazy ride but I am glad we took it. I love you.