A love story

Last week, the girls and I drove down to Tucson to visit my friend and her brand new baby. Well, by brand new I mean she's two months old. Let's pretend she's two days old and that I actually brought a baby gift, shall we? This is my old roommate/best friend Kathy who handmade a very detailed and lovely first year calendar for Gracie and even a handmade blanket. I show up two months later bearing nothing. I suck. For the record, I do have a baby gift planned in my head, it just hasn't happened. Yet.

Anyhoo, we came home the same night and the girls all fell asleep shortly after we left. Driving for two hours in the darkness and glorious silence gave me lots of time to just think. We passed a truck stop and a long lost memory came flooding back that I've continued to think about the past few days. It was back in the day when I was 18 & dating a guy named Cowboy. Ok, his name was Mike, but everyone called him Cowboy. Except his mom who called him Jason. Huh? He was from Montana, but went to Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott. I met him through a friend from church and he had ruddy cheeks, a great adam's apple (I never knew I noticed or cared about adam's apples before) and didn't own a single pair of shorts. I went off to college and discovered more boys and he went off to an internship at NASA in Washington DC. We tried long distance for nearly a year, but I finally called it quits but not before mountains of letters and regularly having to "donate" plasma to pay the phone bills. He was the first to ask me to marry him. He was an all around great guy, and I very much hope he's happy wherever he is.

Back to the story -- I forget how he knew them, but he brought me to the home of some friends of his to introduce us. They were married and 'older' -- probably in their late 30's. That part of the memory is funny now. "Older." !!! They were fun, spunky and adorable -- clearly in love, and while one watched the other as s/he spoke, I swear there were hearts and rainbows and glitter shooting from their eyeballs, if you know what I mean. You don't see that often and it made an impression on me. I asked how they met and was answered with an amazing blue collar love story.

He was a young trucker, she was a young waitress at a truck stop who begrudgingly switched shifts with someone and had to work the night shift. He rolled into the truck stop late one night and was the only customer there. Over greasy food and lots of coffee, they talked all night long. Just the two of them. They talked about family and God and dreams and aspirations and annoyances and joys and everything important to them. The next morning at 9:00, they drove in his semi-truck to the local Justice of the Peace and got married. Heart swelling, she hopped in his truck and they've never looked back. When I met them, they had been married 17 years. 17 years of the most wedded bliss I'd ever seen (ok, I'd only actually seen 3 hours of it, but surely it was somewhat representative of most of the time!!?). Right now, nearly 17 years later, they could even be grandparents... fun, spunky grandparents with a great story. They had known each other no more than 10 hours -- and ran off and got married! Crazy? Beautiful? Foolish? Impulsive? Romantic? Ridiculous? All of the above?

Sometimes meant to be really is.