We all have a story. That is one reason I like to read and blog, to experience the stories of our lives. My story is my story peppered with bits of those I love. It is unique and treasured by me.
This weekend we were privileged to witness the continuation of Melissa and Chris's story as they married and expanded their great families. Mike and I had the further privilege to sit at Table 12, which was, in my humble opinion, the best and most fun and most beautiful table at the reception!
We sat boy girl boy girl. Mike sat next to the Other Amber (that is what she told him to call her since at work she and Amber, another theater friend, work together and this keeps it straight), and for some reason they began talking about how Mike and I met and decided to get married. Here is my version of the story, and I am deliberately leaving out certain details for the sake of us all.
In 1975 I worked at Sears in the Nanuet Mall. I was a college student and needed this job in the catalog department. I had amazing friends there and we were a wild and crazy bunch. Besides taking orders from the catalog (not computerized, all hand written) we also pulled the shipped orders from the shelves in the warehouse and listened to why said orders were perfect or horrible. I climbed to the top of lots and lots of shelves in that warehouse and threw the packages to my co workers, or caught theirs. We were like monkeys: fearless and limber!! After a long while I transferred to customer service and learned to be exceedingly kind and an expert gift wrapper.
Sometime in the years I worked there Mike was employed and in the executive training program for the company. At one point, he was my "boss". We had joint friends one of whom was a gossip girl of epic proportions. Mike and I were good friends. He and I would spend lots of time together on weekends disco dancing in and around NYC with our large gang of friends. He apparently liked me. I thought he was a great friend. I did not date him. Ever. I just knew him to be a great guy who was smart and a good dancer. On a whim one day we decided to make gossip girl talk. While in eye-shot of her we looked at lots of rings. I tried on diamonds. I flashed the McDonald's Arched gold ring with rows of diamonds and giggled with the salesgirl who was in on the plan. A moment later a group of our friends were returning from their coffee break, saw us in the diamond ring department and asked "are you two getting married?" (please remember that we had never ever ever dated, and they knew this). Something made me say yes. Something I don't to this day understand. But I did it. I told a gaggle of young women that I was planning on marrying Mike. At that moment, before he backed into the rack of bras, our lives changed forever!!
There is more to our story, of course. There is the Thanksgiving holiday he wowed my large family, when Aunt Carole told me he was a keeper, the time I threw a not so good girl out of his apartment right before the diamond ring joke, the day my friend Steve told me to just open my eyes and see that Mike and I were supposed to be together (he was the best man in our wedding). A whirlwind of craziness that continues to this day.
Melissa and Chris have a great story. Lots of people do. I guess the moral of this story is never look at two people and assume you know their story. ASK people their story like Other Amber did and enjoy the telling of it.
p.s. "the diamond ring joke" was in mid December 1975, we were married less than a year later on September 11th, 1976.
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