The Seven Year Scratch

7 years ago yesterday, Bob and I got married.

Tonight we cleaned ourselves up, left the girls with my parents and skipped out on all our responsibilities to go to dinner and a movie. While we were at dinner, we decided to talk about things that have happened in each of the past 7 years. Like, something big or momentous or otherwise memorable from each year. It’s amazing how much unimportant crap you can remember without even trying. Like, what date we closed on our house in Durham (January 14, 2000). Or where we were when I took my very last birth control pill ever (snowboarding in WVa with a startup company I was a part of at the time). It was also amazing how hard it was to remember anything in chronological order. We started off in August 1999 in the mountains of NC and went to Chile to snowboard/ski for our honeymoon. From that point on, nothing we said actually followed the event spoken before it. Now that I’m sitting here writing about it, it occurs to me that that’s actually how it is, isn’t it? Life may appear to be linear and chronological, but in reality, it totally isn’t. What you do today may be a reaction to something that happened a week ago, and what you do tomorrow may in fact be the initial harbinger of something else to happen a month from now. Like, I made a doctor appt for Zoe and Lucy 3 weeks ago. That appt is tomorrow. In between we went to the beach. And Zoe and Lucy got Hungry Hungry Hippos for their birthday. The only two of those things that are actually linear are the making and keeping of the doc appt. Though they in fact happened 3 weeks apart. Get it? I know you do, so I’ll stop beating you over the head with it.

Anyway, now I want to tell you a story.

Once upon a time I was in college. One day sophomore year my friend Swooze and I are walking across the Clocktower quad and a guy she knows is walking the opposite direction, toward us. We stop, he stops. They talk. She introduces me. “Laurie, this is Bob. Bob, Laurie.” We keep going, he keeps going. I don’t know what I said then. Something unremarkable probably, like “Nice. Who’s he?” Swooze says, “Oh, he won’t remember your name. I’ve met him a million times and he never remembers my name.”

And she was right. I saw Bob many times after that. We even hung out together on tiny balcony overlooking the Derryberry & Alagia show on the quad. And my name? He never remembered it.

But it didn’t matter. Because he was one of the nicest guys ever. And the coolest (just so cool). And I liked hanging out with him.

10 years later? Married.

Usually when I tell that story this is what I say: When Swooze told me he’d never remember my name, I like to imagine someone running over to us, from out of nowhere, and saying, “Oh no no no no no! He will remember your name. (Well, not at first he won’t. But eventually.) And then you’ll be, like, best friends. And then you’ll get married. So if you see him again, be sure to say hi to him.” And then he would run away (the imaginary messenger from the future, or whoever he was). I’d look at Swooze. She’d look at me. I’d shrug. We’d keep walking.

I know. I know. It’s so Back to the Future. But I like to think about that. And I like to think about how glad I am that the imaginary messenger person was right. And how lucky I am.

Happy Anniversary Bob.