Last week, I mentioned that the story of how I met my wife is why I don’t believe in coincidences. This week, you get the rest of the story.
We take up the story about a week after I arrived as an ugly duckling freshman. One of the things that makes PCC special is that the vast majority of students live on campus. At the time, there was only one dining facility, so if you were a new student, this offered at least three opportunities a day to meet new people. Which is exactly what I did. Pick a random six or seven seat table that was half-full, ask if there was room, and plunk myself down. Since there were never enough seats and tables to eat alone, this was a very common practice during busy meal times.
This was how I met, let’s call her “Ashley” (because she was clearly in the No Go zone on the Hot/Crazy matrix). We really hit it off. I think we met on a Saturday morning, and ended up spending pretty much all day just chatting and hanging out. We spent most of Sunday the same way, meeting up for church, going to lunch together, and hanging out most of the afternoon. It was great! I’d finally made a new friend!
And that was when things started to get a little weird. I’ve always wanted at least a bit of my own space, but Ashley wanted to spend all our time together. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. But she’d memorized my schedule, so I had to change my whole pattern for when I went to meals. Which was how I found myself slinking into the cafeteria fifteen minutes before closing time, grabbing some food, and looking for a quiet, empty table. Which was when I saw her coming in the doors behind me.
Change of plans, I was looking for a half-full table so that the two of us wouldn’t be eating alone if she spotted me!
That’s how I met the Bar Joke trio. An Aussie, a Canadian, and a Hoosier who’d all met and become friends at PCC. The Aussie and Canuck were sophomores, the Hoosier was a junior. And in walked a geek from California.
That those three deigned to let this awkward, gangly nerd sit at their table even once should count as a minor miracle in and of itself. That they allowed me to join their circle of friends, and we’d spend a lot of time hanging out over the next couple of years (along with a few other folks too). Spending time with those three taught me a lot about being comfortable around pretty girls. There was never any real romantic tension (okay, maybe a little, but that’s another story), but I definitely learned a lot.
Fast forward two years. Now I’m a junior myself. The Hoosier graduated, but we were still talking on the phone pretty regularly. As friends. The Aussie had found herself a boyfriend, and I was picking the Canuck up for evening church service. As I’m waiting outside one of the ladies’ dorms for my friend, I meet this incredibly bubbly, enthusiastic Husker. She introduced herself, and then disappeared.
I’d meet her again in the cafeteria a few days later, and she’d introduce herself again, along with two of her friends, a tall, blonde, Iowan farm girl named Jen, and a shorter brunette Hoosier named Jennifer. I was assured that Jen had no interest in me because she “had a boyfriend at home.”
At the time, the first Fine Arts of the year was coming up, and since I’d already taken the Canuck to one the past year, I decided to ask the Husker. She said yes, we went, and were becoming friends, but it was quite evident that was all it would be. Anyway, I needed to keep my streak alive and ask someone else for the next Fine Arts at Thanksgiving.
Right around this time I also started my first off-campus job. I wanted some more spending money, and didn’t want to work for the school like I had the previous year.
That’s how I ended up becoming a telemarketer, trying to sell the New York Times by cold-calling people at dinner time. About the best thing I could say for that job was that it meant I could skip Wednesday night church. Other than that, it was the worst job I ever had, and the only one I’m ever happy to have been fired from. It turned out I just didn’t have what it took to close sales. THANK GOD!
However, I got the news of my termination on a Wednesday afternoon, and suddenly had no plans for someone to go with to Wednesday night service. It was too late to call the Canuck, so I went with Plan B: stay in my room until the last possible second, then slink into the overflow building. At the time, the entire student body + regular attendees wouldn’t fit in the church auditorium, so latecomers went to overflow and watched the service projected onto a big screen in the basketball arena.
At about 6:15pm, just a few minutes before I was going to step out the door, my phone rang. Miss Iowan “I have a boyfriend at home” was looking for someone to join her for church, and no one else had picked up the phone. At least, that’s the story she gave me at the time. The truth turned out to be a little more complicated, but I wouldn’t find that out until later. At the time all I needed to know was that I wouldn’t be slipping into the Sports Center alone.
And that’s how I ended up on the first date with the girl would eventually become my wife. If I’d still had that job, I would have missed the call. If I hadn’t been waiting for the Canuck, I would have never met the Husker who introduced us. I never would have met the Canuck if I hadn’t been trying to dodge “Ashley”. Maybe it’s all just a random set of coincidences, and I’ve just tried to make sense of a random chain in a world that makes no sense. But I don’t believe that, not for a second. All of this happened for a reason. All of it led up to something. And yes, all along the way I made choices, and could have made different choices that would have led somewhere else. But I didn’t. These events and choices led inexorably, improbably, to this event. My life would be completely different now if they had led somewhere else.