A Story Never Told Before:

(To My Wife on Our Anniversary)

Just a cute little story of a cute little mistake: When I was 17 years old I attended Kenwood High School. Before that I went to Deep Creek Junior High. Actually Deep Creek was a “junior/senior high” because in those days junior high schools housed grades seven through nine but DCJSH also had a grade ten. It was the only one of it’s kind in the school system, and what that amounted to really was that when I did go to Kenwood, most of the eleventh graders had already been there a year. No big deal really except in one really important way.

Going from a big junior/senior high to an absolutely huge high school meant many things, especially the opportunity to meet and make many, many new friends. One such person was Pickle. Pic was loud. Pic was fun. Pic was everybody’s friend, which turned out to be the key to the rest of my life. Let me explain.

Pic lived next to the school, so after school I would often walk with her to her house where we would hang out. She introduced me to Neil Young and to Jethro Tull. Yeah, Pic was cool. Hanging out with Pic was just what I did, like one day when, during a typical visit, three of her friends stopped by. Dianne, Pam, and Debbie. Hello.

Pic explained the deal and the availability of each. Um…you gotta start somewhere; right? She told me that Dianne had a long-time boyfriend named Warren, but Pam and Debbie weren’t going with anybody. Um…yeah, I guess, in hindsight I wasn’t extremely careful about writing down the two phone numbers. See, what had happened was…um…I called. Um…after about seven seconds it occurred to me that either I was the victim of an evil plan or Debbie had answered Pam’s phone or I really had switched the names and numbers. Despite what I thought, I really was talking to Debbie on the phone. (For the record, I never did use that other number.)

For the life of me, I cannot remember exactly when I revealed that extremely cute tale of innocent mix-up. Apparently, no harm done though—Friday 20 January marks year 39, so I’m guessin’ she wasn’t too upset.

Happy Anniversary Sweetie. Wish I were there. H