February 12th, backwards and forwards
22 years ago on this date Steve and I met at the Hot Biscuit diner in Kilgore, TX. My roommate Susan and our hall-mate Cindy and I had gone to the Denny's type restaurant to study and have iced tea with multiple free refills (if we had had money we might have even shared an order of fries!!!) We were studying and occasionally chatting when we noticed directly across the nearly empty restaurant some guys about our age studying in a corner booth. The next thing we knew the waitress was walking from their table to ours with a sheet of paper. She gave us the blank notebook paper saying the guys over there wanted our names. We gave our names and she crossed the restaurant and said the same thing to the unsuspecting guys. So over the next hour we wrote all over that sheet of paper, front and back, with the waitress wearing a track in the industrial low-pile carpet between our tables as she delivered our messages. Steve said his name was Ferris and he had a girlfriend, his friends Paul and Fletcher gave us their real names with no mention of any girlfriends. We said all manor of silly things as writing to the guys was way more fun than actually studying. At one point I wrote out a lyric to a song by a very obscure Christian band at the time called "the choir":
"Happy fool reasons have I
Happy fool notions have you
I say the sky is as blue as the ocean
You say you know it's true
So tie your shoelaces
To my shoelaces
I'll tie a rope to a tree
We'll see how the wind whips
Happy fool faces
Come blow away with me"
Steve wrote back and said he knew the band and was planning on going to their next concert in the Dallas area. I wrote and said I was going to the same concert as it was going to be in my hometown of Arlington, TX (not Dallas thank you very much!) And so began our great love affair with a single sheet of paper and a bored yet helpful waitress on this date 22 years ago at the Hot Biscuit! We did end up going to that concert together less than a month later. Those song lyrics I wrote out quite glibly actually proved to be somewhat prophetic! (I still have that scribbled upon notebook paper, I had kept it to show Tyan, our other hall-mate, the evidence of our "paper flirting" with guys from LeTourneau!)
On this date in just 4 months our baby girl will be clothed in a cap and gown and will graduate from high school! I can't believe it... I feel a mid-life crisis coming on. I mean how can I be so old already?! My youngest is now taller than me and my oldest is the same age I was when I met Steve 22 years ago! My mind is spinning. I will end with Ferris Bueller's famous quote in light of life and the name Steve wrote as his own all those years ago!
"Happy fool reasons have I
Happy fool notions have you
I say the sky is as blue as the ocean
You say you know it's true
So tie your shoelaces
To my shoelaces
I'll tie a rope to a tree
We'll see how the wind whips
Happy fool faces
Come blow away with me"
Steve wrote back and said he knew the band and was planning on going to their next concert in the Dallas area. I wrote and said I was going to the same concert as it was going to be in my hometown of Arlington, TX (not Dallas thank you very much!) And so began our great love affair with a single sheet of paper and a bored yet helpful waitress on this date 22 years ago at the Hot Biscuit! We did end up going to that concert together less than a month later. Those song lyrics I wrote out quite glibly actually proved to be somewhat prophetic! (I still have that scribbled upon notebook paper, I had kept it to show Tyan, our other hall-mate, the evidence of our "paper flirting" with guys from LeTourneau!)
On this date in just 4 months our baby girl will be clothed in a cap and gown and will graduate from high school! I can't believe it... I feel a mid-life crisis coming on. I mean how can I be so old already?! My youngest is now taller than me and my oldest is the same age I was when I met Steve 22 years ago! My mind is spinning. I will end with Ferris Bueller's famous quote in light of life and the name Steve wrote as his own all those years ago!
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