Today is…

Do you know what today is? It’s a very important day but it’s not on your calendar unless you live at my house, so rather than have you guess I’ll just tell you…no, wait, guess once.

If you guessed that it is Lee Marvin’s birthday you are technically correct because he would have been 89 today, but that’s not the important event I am thinking of. What I’m thinking of is the fact that three years ago today Ella and I met for the first time. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was nervously sitting on an Amtrak train on my way to meet a girl that I liked. As you can tell, it went well.

I’ve told the story of how we got together but here are a few secret facts about that first meeting:

-We had been emailing back and forth for a few weeks before we first spoke on the phone. And during our first phone call there was almost no flirting or anything else of that sort. In fact, I was totally friend zoned by the time we hung up.

-A few months earlier I was supposed to go out to the west coast to meet a different girl whom I had met through my blog. She ended up bailing on me a few days before the trip, so when I decided to go and meet Ella I kept it secret from all but my family and a few friends until the day before I left, just to avoid jinxing it.

-I chose Amtrak over flying because it was cheaper and also (at that time) I hadn’t been on a plane since 1996 and was a little afraid of navigating O’Hare airport by myself.

-I arrived ridiculously early for my train and spent nearly an hour driving around the block to kill time.

-It was an all-night train to Albany so I looked pretty haggard, and the first thing I said to Ella was something like, “Damn, that sucked. Can we get something to eat?”

-As I was about to board my train home I said, “I think I’ll move out here and marry you.”*

*(I did not actually say this, or even think it, for another three weeks)

From meeting exactly three years ago to being married for (roughly) six months has been the best period of my life, and I know that we’re only just getting started. Thanks for playing along at home with me.