On My Husband's Birthday: Connecting the Dots

I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. --David Moranis

Today is my husband's birthday, and birthdays always make me reflect on the "It's a Wonderful Life"-ishness of our connection to the people who come into our lives. I don't know to what extent I really agree with all of the quote above, but in a general way, I do. So much of life seems to revolve around choices (what if I had chosen this instead of that?) and chance encounters (what if I hadn't happened to be where I was right then?), and when those choices and chance encounters all point in the same direction, that's when you think maybe there's such a thing as fate.

The truth is, my husband and I were connected before we connected. I mean that in a literal way, but there's definitely a cosmic sense in which those connections were there to pave the way for us to meet. 

The Guy

When my sister was a junior in high school, I was a sophomore in college. That was the year she started talking about a guy named Garroll among her group of friends. 

"Wait," I said to her when she pointed out a skinny guy with a friendly face in a photo she had taken. "Are you saying Garroll, with a G?"

"Yes," she explained. "His dad's name is Gary, and his mom's middle name is Carol, so they combined them."

Truthfully, the name didn't faze me much--at our high school, there were a lot of unusual names--guys named Royster and Spivey, and girls named Johnna and Shalie. So Garroll didn't seem so odd.

Over the years after high school, the two of them--my sister and Garroll--remained friends, and I heard about him from her. Since they both were single for so long, I thought maybe, since they were such good friends, they might end up together, but it seems they never really thought of each other that way.

The Sister

When I was in my first job out of college, there was a teenager who worked in the mail room after school, and I learned through my sister that it was Garroll's little sister, Lerenda (also a combination of the parents' names). Since I had another friend who worked in the mail room, I interacted with her a fair amount--a very nice girl.

After she went away to college, she came back and met and married a guy I knew through another close friend. She and I went to the same church, and when her first child was born, I was on the church "dinner brigade" to bring meals to families with newborns.

Occasionally, her brother would visit the church, and I spoke to him a couple of times--mostly, he was just confirming that my sister was around. I was nothing more than Carolyn's married sister at that point.

The Mom

For a while, my parents and Garroll's parents went to the same church, so they've known each other for years. When Lerenda was still in high school, she wanted to go on a missions trip with the same organization my brother had gone with earlier, so their family (minus Garroll) came over to our house for them to learn more about my brother's experience.

His mom taught kindergarten at the school my son went to from 1st to 7th grade--had we moved back to North Carolina a year earlier, she would have been his kindergarten teacher. It was a small school, though, so she knew him, and I saw a lot of her at school functions.

Several of her closest friends are women I have been connected with in various ways over the years--women I have worked with, women who taught my son.

The Reunion

In 2008, when I had been divorced for a while, our high school had a decade reunion for everyone who went to school there in the 80s. My sister and I were the representatives for our respective classes, but the process of planning the reunion was somewhat stressful because the woman coordinating the whole thing was the control-freakiest control freak I've ever encountered. I was so fed up with her that I ended up not putting a lot of energy into trying to convince my classmates to come.

So, when the reunion weekend got there, only a handful of people from my class came, and I spent time hanging around with my sister's class. At the Saturday picnic lunch, I was sitting with a group that included my sister and Garroll, and another guy from their class came over and said something to Garroll, calling him "Gerald."

I was incensed: "Did he just call you Gerald?" He shrugged it off, but he seemed amused that it made me so indignant on his behalf. And that moment was when the dots--and he and I--finally connected.

The Connection

It took a whole year after that of talking and spending time together before we really knew we wanted to be together, and between that reunion and our wedding, it was almost exactly two years.

I'm not going to say that it was fate, but today, when I'm celebrating the birth of this man who became my husband, I am awfully glad those connections all lined up in such a way that we ended up together.

Happy birthday to you, love!