How I Met My Wife

Due to a lackluster Cardinal effort last night and the fact that I’ve been told my blog gets avoided occasionally due to its St. Louis content, we’ll do a little history lesson today.

This evening, our church starts an eight-week class called “Making Love Last a Lifetime.”  It’s the first time we’ve done something like this (another indication of Blake’s inventiveness and new perspective) and it should be interesting to see the mix of people that will be in there.  There are some signed up that have been married a long time, some that are more recently married, and some that aren’t even married at all.  I know Blake didn’t write the material (it’s a course designed by Adam Hamilton), but I’m still curious how those older folks are going to react to a young preacher bringing this to them.  Still, if they didn’t want to be there, they wouldn’t have signed up.

That, coupled with the fact there is a new show this fall called How I Met Your Mother, leads me to how I met my wife.  It’s an intricate process that is my ready-made example of how God provides.  Because if any of the steps had gone just slightly different, I’d likely be an old man with a number of dogs now instead of a husband and a father.

Wind the clock back to the summer of 1994.  My good friend Shively (who was best man at my wedding for many reasons, but this is one of them) tells me there is this show that I have to watch.  It’s funny, well-written, great theme song, etc.  So finally, in summer reruns, I catch an episode or two of this show and was hooked.  The show: Friends.

Once I get interested in something, I tend to really be immersed in it.  In the early days of the Internet (which this was, definitely), there weren’t a lot of graphical interfaces, but there were a lot of options of the text variety.  One of these (and as far as I know, it still is around today) were the list-servs.  You basically were on a large e-mailing list, and everyone’s message about the show was sent to everyone on the list.  One of the forerunners to today’s bulletin boards, like CardsClubhouse.com.

Anyway, my friend Dustin was the only person I knew with the Internet.  Sometimes the guys would hang out and, if there wasn’t anything else to do, we’d wind up at Dustin’s to look stuff up, etc.  On one of those trips, I found a Friends list-serv and signed up.  I had an e-mail at college (I had filled out the form for it—this is before they automatically gave you one when you registered) and could connect from my dorm room to check it.

Didn’t take long before I realized that was a mistake.  First, there were a flood of messages—20 or 30 a day, at least.  Second, it wasn’t extremely welcoming of new people.  I had a signature on my messages that said something like “Baseball guru, Cardinal fan, all around nice guy.”  When I got busted on for that, I figured it was time to leave.  I figured out how to unsubscribe and that was that.

A few days later, though, I got an e-mail from someone wanting help.  Seems she had the same idea I had, but she couldn’t figure out how to get off the list.  I showed her how, we continued chatting via e-mail and struck up a friendship.

After a while, she told me about a place called Cactus.  Cactus was the next evolutionary form of the bulletin board, with rooms and everything, just no graphics.  You didn’t use a web browser, you just telnetted into it.  If someone else was on (and you could see who was on with a simple command), you could send messages back and forth.  Since my signature at that time in my e-mail referred to Cal Ripken, Jr. (who was closing in on Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak, if he hadn’t passed it by then), she suggested that I sign up as Cal and she’d sign up as Callie, which would make it easier to find each other.

The first time we tried it, it didn’t work so well, but we finally got the hang of it.  I can’t tell you how many hours I spent on there, talking to her as well as a variety of other people.  A few of them, I’m still in touch with today.

That was the fall of my sophomore year, and I continued on Cactus throughout my college career.  It was around March of my senior year when I noticed a poster named Janeway on the board.  Assuming (correctly) that they had taken the name from the captain on the new Star Trek, I sent a message and we started talking.

We talked regularly until graduation approached.  As it did, I wasn’t sure how often I’d have Internet access at home, where I was going until I could find a job.  So I suggested that she write me snail mail.  I really didn’t think much of the request, but it stuck with her.  Not long into that summer, I got my first letter from her and quickly responded.  It turned out my Internet was more available than I thought, so we talked on there as well.  We’d call back and forth sometimes, as well.

I finally got a job in Little Rock and got my apartment about a month before I was to start, so she came down to visit.  We had a wonderful time and she didn’t want to leave.  She visited twice more when I lived in Little Rock and then, after I visited up there, she came down to Russellville (where I was living by then) for a Christmas visit in 1998, when I proposed by leaving a message on Cactus and having her come in to read it.

It’s closing in on six years now that we’ve been married.  We’ve bought a house, gotten a dog, and had a kid.  It’s not been perfect—she’s messier than I am, I could cook more for her taste—but it’s been happy.

Sorry for the length.  Hope you have enjoyed it anyway!