Three Decades in the General Vicinity

My sister Victoria and her husband Michael just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the day they met. They have a nice story. (Read it here.)
It got us thinking. We don't remember the day we met. We barely remember the year we met. But we must have met in kindergarten, because here is our class photo.

It's like fate that we are close enough to circle our two heads, don't you think?
The boy under the yellow arrow is Johnny. He had such dreamy brown eyes. And he had a crush on me. He would sit next to me on the floor during reading time. I would scoot away and he would follow until Miss Pat told us to sit still. If she caught us while we were sitting together it was like the last petal of the daisy saying "He loves me." He moved away at the end of the year. Again, like fate.
It wasn't until much later that I developed my crush on Casey. Three whole years later. By then he had his own crush on my best friend, Jenny. I used to pass the notes back and forth between them. I wonder why I never checked the No boxes on those "Do you like me?" notes. Too innocent, I guess. I'd do it in a heartbeat now.

(Here we are again! We don't get any cuter than this.)
(And check out the Dukes of Hazard Tee top left.)


Here's how I fell in love with Casey: At age eight my phobia was BOREDOM. Specifically, Eternal Boredom, as in "If God knows everything and lives forever, than He must be BORED! I don't want to live forever!!!!" This is what I thought when I lay in my bed at night and couldn't sleep. Weird, I know. (My previous phobia was earthquakes. My subsequent phobia was MX missiles.) (Did anyone else have irrational phobias as a child?)
So one day at school they had all the second graders sitting cross legged on the floor and we must have been doing some kind of presentation for parents or something. The teachers would ask a question, then hand the microphone to a kid for the answer. I remember one girl told us how to spell "friend" by saying the mnemonic "FRIday is the END." I've spelled that word perfectly ever since.
Then, (the fateful moment) a teacher asked, "What is the only constant, sure thing?" She let some kids try to answer. We came up with Death and Taxes, etc. She shot us all down, then handed the mic to Casey.
And he said, "The only constant is change."
I was stunned. Seriously. My phobia vanished like a puff of steam. He was my hero.

It took me years to realize that the whole thing was staged. I mean, Casey was always a brain but his bent was Math/Sciences--never Philosophy.

When I did my "remember when" about this pivotal moment, Casey said, "That never happened." (!!!)---That is what he says about things he doesn't remember. Looking back over 30 years that happens a lot. ('nother mnemonic--"a lot" is a lot of words--I think my friend Kyle Frank told me that one. Yes, I used to spell it "alot.") It's our own personal law: The Conservation of Memory--if one of us remembers it, the other one probably doesn't. When we say "remember when..." it is not a rhetorical question. I think that's a good thing, in a way. That way, even though we share so many of the same experiences, we haven't run out of stories to tell each other.

We haven't really had 30 years "together" (yet), but you could say we were close the whole time.