Personalish: 12 October 2002

Six years ago on this date, the husband and I had been dating for maybe five or six weeks. And I liked him enormously, but due to some bad past experiences I was trying very hard not to use the L-word (no, not "lesbian." The other L-word.), reasoning that this time, before declaring my undying affection, it might be good to get to know him a bit. So, dating. Also we had some very different upbringings and very different understandings of how the world worked: he was astrology, I was astronomy; he was born of transcendental-meditating hippies, I was born of born-again glossolaliacs; he was studying religion, I had a degree in chemistry. So there were some reservations about how well that was going to work out.

And then he won a radio call-in contest and got two free tickets to a Cowboy Junkies concert in Des Moines. Which, the Cowboy Junkies' cover of "Sweet Jane" had somehow become "our song" at some point, because I had been making a habit of bringing him white roses when I visited his place (white because, again, not wanting to be pushy, not wanting to push too far ahead of where we actually were), and the song mentions white roses, and we thought the song mentions white roses but apparently it doesn't (see comments), but even if it hadn't been a special song to us, I really liked the Cowboy Junkies (having an instinctive love of all things Canadian: Canadian citizenship committees, take note!) and would have gone anyway. So we went.


And you know, I don't actually remember the night all that well. I mean, I wrote it down in my journal: I could look it up. But I mainly remember two things. One, there was a moment before we got to the concert where I was absolutely positive that he was going to crash the car and we were both going to die. Neither of those things actually happened, but there was some abrupt braking on the interstate and that was scary. And the other thing was that after the concert, after the drive back, I realized that, whether I liked it or not, this was not all just me wanting to be in love, that I actually was in love, and I was at some point going to have to say so. Chances were going to have to be taken. I didn't say so that night; I'm not sure when it was. But I knew as of 12 October 2002 that this was going to be something.

Consequently, though we do celebrate the night we met (24 August 2002) as our "official" "anniversary," the more meaningful date to me is 12 October.