It was a cold and stormy night...oh, wait...wrong story....sorry.  I tend to let my mind wander aimlessly sometimes.  I know it's gonna forget to come back one day...

 A long, long, long time ago...pre Star Wars...back in 1970 our county decided that integration was the way to go.  So I ended up going to a middle school that had historically been all black.  So did the FABB....but back then I wasn't fat and she wasn't the FABB.  We were in the 7th grade when we met.  We had some classes in common all through high school till we graduated in 1976.  I think she had a crush on me back then...but then who wouldn't??

((((Put old picture here))))

After graduation from high school we went our separate ways.  She went to Texas and I went to the Army. 

I can only tell you my side of this story so she'll have to add her's later. 

I went to Ft. Jackson for Basic Training.  I stayed there through Pre-AIT.  I had to learn the basics of Electronics before they sent me to Ft. Gordon to learn how to fix their radios.  Well, I met my ex-wife, Sandy, there.  We got married while we were at Gordon. We moved to DC and had our first kid, Chris (aka Squirt) there. Uncle Sam gave us an extended vacation in Mannheim, Germany. 

I really enjoyed it there.  But all that's for a later writing, maybe my memoirs!! 

My Babydoll, Sarah, was born there.  Then Uncle Sam decided it was time to come back to the states and sent us to California.  After 6 months there we (read she) decided we wanted to settle down somewhere and raise our family without all the travelling, so we came back to Raleigh.  We made this as an intelligent decision, Raleigh and RTP were just starting to grow. 

Well, after a few more years we called it quits, but not until after we added three more kids...Preshus, Punkin and Spike.  Ever heard of 'cheaper to keep her'?  It's true....very.

 <<<pictures of kids here>>>

Let's speed the clock ahead a few years...I was working a contract at Kodak and got a call saying my dad was going to the hospital with chest pains.  I rushed up there and a few days later he was no longer with us.

<<<<put up picture of dad>>>

I quit my job and moved back to take care of mom.  She was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's.  As a side note, this is one of the most horrendous diseases that I have experienced in my life.  My mom is still here in body, but her mind and spirit have left her....I still wonder why this is allowed to happen, but that too is another issue to write.

So, I've been out of work for about a year and all my savings are depleted.  I'm sitting at home helping mom get back to some form of physical normality.  I'm surfing the web one day and decided to go to My Space.

They have a section there where you can search for people from your schools that have registered with them.  I registered and did a search and she was the only person from our school registered.....is that weird or what?

We exchanged pleasantries and she caught me up to date on what she had been up to.  Being the social butterfly that she has become she even filled me in on several of our common friends.  We emailed and talked on the phone for several weeks and then one day came 'that' email.  You know the one....."I've got this coupon to a great little steakhouse around here and I need someone to go with me."

Yep, that one.  I agreed, after all we had been friends in high school and we were getting to be pretty close now, too.  So I said yes.....and that was the start of it....

We decided to go one night and figured we'd have a pretty good time just getting to catch up F2F. 

I had found out that the Perseids were just a day off peak so I asked if she wanted to go to a dark region and watch.  Since she had never seen a 'shooting star' before she was interested.

I didn't really tell her that I live in a dark region but we went there anyway.  We got to the end of my dead end road and parked the car.  It was a beautifully clear night. We leaned on the front of the car and just stared for a while.  I saw several and she hadn't learned how to open her field of view up and not focus. 

Finally she got the idea and it happened...her first shooting star!!!  She was as giddy as a schoolgirl for a while.  It was kinda nice to see her smile, she really didn't smile much in school all those years ago.

Well, we were sitting there reveling in the absence of her shooting star cherry when I saw something that totally overwhelmed me.   I was looking at her while we were talking and right over her head streaked a really HUGE, red, glowing, almost flaming meteor!! 

It was the only time I had seen anything like it.  I know there are terms like minutes and seconds to use to describe the size of the meteor and it's tail but I'm not familiar enough with them to be accurate that way so...I'll just say that if I held my arms fully extended and put my forefingers at the beginning of the flame and at the end....my arms would have formed about a 90 degree angle.  I don't how to translate that but....IT WAS REALLY LONG!!!!

That is now an official unit of measurement on the FAB website.

But it wasn't the size of the flamer that was making me weirded out....it was right over her head....I mean right directly over her head from my point of view...and I don't mean 10 feet...I mean just a few inches, like 3 or 4.

I'm not a terribly religious man.....but ya know...sometimes you just gotta wonder....know what I mean Verne?

From there things just started to happen. We spent more time together, we started saying the same things at the same time, we started having the same thoughts at the same time, we didn't have to provide a backstory to share something from our school days because we knew each other's friends.

If you've never experienced those things....you just don't know what you're missing. 

We started hanging out more and more and one day we started talking about getting married, she brought it up first.

So one day I called her at lunch and asked her to meet me at the court house so we could get our license.  We did and walked across the hall to the JOP and told him we did. 

The rest is history.....as time goes maybe I can fill in the blanks on some of the other stories in our lives....you might not be interested but I'll enjoy finally writing it.