Never Say Good-bye.....Part I

Our wedding anniversary is this Saturday, the 22^nd of April. We defied a lot of odds getting here.

I heard rumors that there was pool going on during our wedding on how long we would last. Rumor has it the longest bet was 5 years.

Well here we are 17 years later, still going strong.

We met in high school. The old joke about “this one time, at band camp…” well that’s where we met.

It was August of 1986, I was seventeen and it was four weeks before the beginning of my senior year. I lived in a small town so when a new kid came to our school, it was a big deal. I remember hanging with my friends Jessica and Deanna, kind of half heartedly practicing a flag routine we were making up and waiting for band camp to start for the day when a big ugly Monte Carlo pulled up and two guys got out.

Instantly, we were paying attention. One of the guys was really young, probably an 8^th grader, we dismissed him, but the older one looked our age. We were curious. What instrument did he play? What grade was he in?

Dave says he spotted me that first day and thought I was cute, he said he thought I had a great butt, so he asked some of the other trumpet players about me.

“Oh no” the told him “forget about her, she’s a member of the God Squad (the nickname for the flag line) you won’t get anywhere with her, she’s locked together at the knees.

Dave, of course, took this as a personal challenge.

I got to know him at band camp, we flirted back and forth a lot, and on October 31^st we had our first kiss in the back seat of the band bus on the way home from an away football game.

But pretty soon after that, maybe even because he saw me hanging out with Dave, my old boyfriend started trying to get back with me. I had to make a choice; a boy I had just met and whose parents moved every year or the boy I dated pretty much all my junior year. In hindsight it was pretty dumb to go back with the boy that had dumped me the summer before our senior year, but he was safe and comfortable.

Unbeknownst to me, Dave had his eye on me and decided the best way to win me back was to get my boyfriend to get in a fight with him. He kept picking on me. He threw me in a trashcan in the middle of the cafeteria, then he tossed me out the window in journalism class and I had to walk all the way around the school to get back in. And on our journalism class field trip, he tossed me in a mud puddle. But, it didn’t work; my boyfriend wasn’t a fighter.

In the meantime, Dave started dating one of my best friends, Jessica, and on April 15, 1987, when it came time for his family to move again, she threw him a going away party.

I went to the party, without my boyfriend, not thinking much about it, not knowing that this would be the night that would be pivotal in my life.

A bunch of us were outside hanging out, when Dave picked me up and started spinning me around. We both fell to the ground laughing; our faces close to each other. He got a funny look on his face and abruptly got up and walked away.

About 30 minutes later, my friend Jessica came up to me.

“Dave is in my room and you need to go talk to him.” So I went back to talk to him.

“I broke up with Jessica,” he told me “I broke up with Jessica because I’m in love with you and it isn’t fair for me to keep dating her when I want you. I don’t expect you to do anything about this, you’re dating Heath, but I couldn’t leave town without telling you, and without doing this.”

And he kissed me, kissed me like I had never been kissed before in my 18 years of life.

At that moment, I realized I loved him. I loved him and had for a while, I had just been too stupid and too scared to admit it.

He pulled back, looked me in the eyes, smiled, and turned and walked out of the room. He walked out to where the rest of his friends were, grabbed his jacket, said good-bye, and left the party. He says that when he left, he thought he would never see me again.

But I knew what I had to do. The next day, I called my boyfriend and broke up with him. Then I called Dave and asked him if he would like to come back in a month and take me to my Senior Prom. We got together that afternoon, met each other’s parents, and had one magical day together. The next day his family moved to Austin, four hours away.

Four hours is a long time when you’re 18 years old. We wrote a lot of letters and saved our dollars for long distance phone calls, and a month later he came back to town and we went to my Senior Prom together.

The theme song to that Prom was Bon Jovi’s “Never Say Good-bye” and to this day, that is “Our Song”. Starting to date in a long distance relationship, breaking up and getting back together again, our marriage filled with long deployments…yes, Never Say Good-bye has been the theme to our entire love. But through it all we’ve made it work.

Stay tuned for Part II, a.k.a. How Fate Brought Us Together Again