8.26.21
4th Time’s A Charm
C. Derick Miller – Head Writer
Your Stories on Video
Here we are again! Rolling up on my two-year wedding anniversary in a few days and I’m not quite sure where I want to take my darling bride. Last year, we took off for a weekend in San Antonio during the height of the 2020 pandemic but now things are a little more dire. What to do, what to do…
The movie of our meeting plays on repeat in my mind. I was working as a traveling fine art handler, driving from one end of the country to the other, offering my well-trained hands to artists, museums, and universities to safely manipulate their art collections. One day, I got a totally new voice on the phone when I called the home office. Her name was Samantha, and I was immediately smitten. Then, I met her.
Honestly, she was incredibly beautiful, but she scared the living hell out of me! When I came off the road and began working in the same office she did, she yelled at me after our first interaction. As luck would have it, we parked at the same time and were walking up to the front door together. Some idiotic yet accurate passerby gave her a whistle and I brought it to her attention. Huge mistake. Come to find out, she was happily (as far as the general public was concerned) married at the time and considered the random cat call to be offensive. I, in turn, was equally offensive for condoning it. I collapsed into my desk and tried to the best of my abilities to avoid her. I was unsuccessful.
Time after time, Sam and I would butt heads like sworn enemies during office discussions over politics, religious beliefs, music, movies, current events, breathing, etc. Basically everything! It felt like high school all over again and, as the fates would play their cruel games, I ended up sitting next to the girl who thought my hair was too long or didn’t like my heavy metal t shirts. There were nights when I wanted to research witchcraft spells and put mojos on her. I was days away from gluing a photograph of her face to a voodoo doll…but I was so in love with her. It’s strange how the human heart works, isn’t it? Screwed up, insane little organ that it is!
Then, she asked me to lunch! To be honest, I was frightened, and couldn’t help but wonder what her ulterior motive was. We ordered our food, and she went to the bathroom. I quickly checked her area for any hidden knives or a gun or anything else she could’ve used to end me before returning to the office. Come to find out, she’d brought me there to confess some things about her personal life and I was the only person she trusted enough to tell. She needed an ear, and someone to care. Surprisingly enough, I was that person. It was strange. I’ve never associated myself with being any type of comforting soul before. Then again, I’d never known anyone like Samantha.
To make a long story short, she and her husband were separating and heading toward divorce. Now, I could use these paragraphs to trash this guy for all the things he’s said and done (and continues to say and do) but I feel as though I’ve grown enough over the last couple of years not to do so. Ultimately, his loss was my gain. Sam and I became very close friends and continued our lunch meetings over the next year. She would tell me her divorce woes and I would compare them to my own and encourage her to hold her head up. Then…lunch meetings turned into karaoke Friday nights.
Before we knew it, karaoke Friday nights turned into confessions of love, trust, and forever. Even though it freaked out everyone at the office (because they had no idea after a year of working together that she and I even had a thing going on) and it disturbed some people outside of our office (because I’m seventeen years older than she is), we decided to get married. I inherited a young stepson and began fatherhood all over again. She is truly the best friend I’ve never had in my life. I can’t think of anyone else on the entire planet that I’d want to share a pandemic with!
So, now, the question remains…
What do we do on our COVID ridden anniversary to keep us both safe?
Better yet, what’s your story? How did you and your significant other meet? Was this other person your high school sweetheart or did you trial and error it through the dating pool like I did? Here at Your Stories on Video, we want to know all about it! We’re suckers for a good, sappy love story. No lie, we will eat it up! We want to put this story on film for future generations of your family to watch and catch diabetes from all the sweetness involved in your tale! We want your grandchildren to do the ‘finger down the throat’ gesture when their parents force them to watch it over and over again, knowing darn well that they’ll be in love some day.
We’re waiting…