What A Lucky Man He Was

Mary was as beautiful then—inside and out—as she is now. I would savor passing glimpses of her in physical sciences class, in the hallway of C.C. White as I passed her on my way to do my radio show, with her friends at football games. There has always been something magical about her smile. And those eyes! Let me tell you about those eyes! If the eyes are truly the window to the soul, Mary’s radiated a kind of beauty that I thought could exist only as fantasy. I know the reader is going to find this hard to believe, but I was the quintessential geeky nerd before the term was even coined. I mention this only to set the stage for how truly miraculous it was that Mary ever agreed (thanks Sacko and Peterson!) to go to the Valentine’s Day dance with me. Naturally, she couldn’t remember ever having seen me (see Happy Earth Day!) on campus, a fact that I intended to take advantage of for as long as I could. To that point, I was definitely not a “to know me is to love me” kind of guy, and so my plan was to cherish every moment with Mary that I could until she realized she could do better. That’s how this ongoing miracle of thirty-eight years began: an Alpha Gam innocently fell into the carefully laid snare of a gnarly independent and then apparently couldn’t figure out how to get untangled. Am I a lucky guy, or what?