My Own Chance Encounter

Thinking about the last post I made, I realize a chance encounter was important in my own life as well. Meeting my husband was in large part due to a conversation I had when I was a freshman in college waiting in my dorm's lunch line. I started having a conversation with a girl I hardly knew and she was telling me about a place she was going to live for her sophomore year that was an off-campus student co-op (a place where the students all pitched in to maintain the property as well as cook the meals). I had always thought that for my sophomore year, I would continue to live at a dorm on campus but her description intrigued me and right after lunch I did some investigating. To make a VERY long story short, I did end up living at the co-op and two weeks after I moved in, I met one of my neighbors who lived down the hall. We became good friends and later started dating. Just this past week, we celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary. I can't help but think that if I hadn't had that conversation with someone I hardly knew that day long ago, my life would have been very different.
--Bridget

Meeting the 'one'.

The love story is a big part of the Video Biographies I have been fortunate to create for people thus far. Not by design though. It is one topic nobody is shy to talk about and one that needs the least amount of prodding on my part.

And they all make me go, 'Awww'.

'The photographer at the wedding took something like a 100 pictures. When we got back from our honeymoon, he called to say that none of them came out! So there we were... one week after the wedding, gathering everyone we could to come to our pretend wedding at the church once again just so that we could get the pictures. And you'll notice there are no flowers, no maids of honor because no one was available, and my dad had just had his tooth removed so he wasn't really smiling as he walked me down the aisle... it was heartbreaking at the time. But we can laugh now.'

'You know in those days, weddings weren't as elaborate as they are now. My mother made my wedding dress.'

'Well, the first time L saw me was through the peephole of her apartment. I was a friend of her brother's and he thought we should meet. She, on the other hand, expected a writer to be tougher, sadder, weirder, long-haired... something like that. It was quite a disappointment for her, I learned later, to find regular, normal-looking me!'

'We were in Elementary School together.'

'I've been married 54 years. One wife.'

'I had a rule. I wasn't going to ask someone to marry me unless I'd lived with them for 6 months. So at the end of the 6 months, I made dinner and waited for her to come home. And then I got down on one knee... and she said, 'Oh no!' We're still married.'