How We Met and Happy Birthday

To my husband Weien, who always manages to give me better presents than I give him:

“How We Met and Happy Birthday”

As told by your wife, who can’t spend more money on you since we bought you that cool new phone last month.

Before I get too old to remember, or before details start to fade, I want to tell you how we first met. We’ve talked a bit about our story and how some parts we like and some we don’t, how sometimes it's too long and other times not quite long enough, so I want to be sure when I tell it this time, it's just right.

“Gracie, it doesn’t matter so much what your story IS right now,” my college academic advisor told me calmly, one spring day during one of my mental breakdowns due to the problem of WHERE IS MY LIFE GOING?. “What really matters is how you spin it.”

This made me stop hyperventilating, but she still sensed my confusion. “Watch this,” she instructed. Her fingers hovered over her keyboard for a second like pelican with its eye on a fish before they dove in for the kill.

My name is Grace Hollister, she typed. I’m a student at North Central College, where I am studying Communication, Sociology, and Global Studies. I’m the Honors Representative for my class and I’m writing a senior thesis on human trafficking.

“Now watch this,” she said again as she started a new paragraph.

My name is Grace Hollister. I have a heart for global issues, including the endemic of human trafficking. I believe that research on this topic and others is vitally important as it benefits both the researcher and the public, and that’s why I support my fellow classmates in their researching endeavors by representing my class on the Honors Program Board here at North Central College.

Before my very eyes, my advisor had transformed me from a ho-hum plain Jane into someone I actually wanted to be.

“Now do that all the time, with every part of your life – you might be surprised at how many opportunities pop up when you see yourself as someone worthwhile.” She smiled and winked and on the way out the door I saw the “Girls Rule” postcard she had taped to her door.

I saw you for the first time on the first day of our last year of college. You rushed into class, holding your backpack in your hand and a muffin between your teeth , just on time for “Perspectives on Abortion” with Dr. Keys. That first day I thought you were cute, but you sat across from me and to the left and offered a few people candy that you’d brought back from your recent trip to China.

“Would you like a piece?”

“What is it?” I answered, immediately wishing I had just said yes instead of demanding additional information about the strangely-packaged candy.

“It’s from China,” you answered.

You sat by me the next time our class met and you always had some sort of snack with you – muffins, Teddy Grahams, or (the weirdest) corn on the cob. But one morning you brought a peanut butter sandwich and for the whole two hour-long class, its smell made me nauseous.

“That smells pretty bad.”

“What, my sandwich? It’s peanut butter.”

“Yeah... I can tell.”

I didn’t see much of you again until March when we were both selected to go to a conference in New York. We sat next to each other as we rode upstate in the bus from the airport, and on that bus ride, I felt more vibrant than I had in over five years. I didn’t know it at the time, but somewhere between Buffalo and Ithaca, I started falling in love with you.

It was something about talking with you. I was amazed that you seemed genuinely interested in the people around you, which is a fairly rare quality in a 21-year-old man. You joined me in sitting backwards on our bus seat to include the guy behind us in our conversation. At one point I took a good seven or eight minutes to explain to you that I felt weird about how a few of our fellow classmates taking pictures of the Mennonites we saw standing on a street corner, and when I looked up, there you were, staring right back at me – you had actually paid attention to what I was saying.

Maybe the fact that you treated me how you should have treated me in conversation shouldn’t have been so impressive to  me, but it was. I hate it when I can sense the person I’m talking to is just thinking of what they’re going to say next instead of actually listening to me. One could argue that I shouldn’t just fall in love with the first guy who actually cares about what I’m saying, so I’ll also add here that when my knee grazed yours as we turned around to face forward, I was very, very aware of it, and that feeling doesn’t just happen to me every day.

That evening, a group of us explored downtown Ithaca. I watched you then, feeling refreshed at your fascination with the tired-looking college town. Most guys I knew then were more interested in some cyber-world than in the real one. They’d talk about videogames or football or food and joke around endlessly, but you wondered about what it was like to be a baker or a bus driver in upstate New York. You were different.

Then you wanted to eat at Waffle Frolic, a local waffle house (so not ENTIRELY different), and everyone bailed on you after I’d already said I’d go, so it was just you and me, on the second floor of Waffle Frolic, sharing ice cream covered fried batter. It was so good. I tried really hard to think of the last time I’d had so much fun and I honestly couldn’t think of when that was.

We had a lot of fun for the next few days. We slid down banisters, we had life-changing (no exaggeration) late night conversations in the hotel lobby, you made me stay up until we heard birds chirping, you made me try my first mushroom, and you sat next to me on every single leg of the trip home. At that point I knew you were someone special. In fact, I was even fairly convinced I would eventually marry you. You took a bit more time to realize that, but we had fun in the meantime, and you came to your senses about a month after we got home. Because of you, the final two months of my college career were more fun than the rest of college was combined, and I’ve been having more and more fun ever since.

It’s so strange to think that all of this almost didn’t happen. I almost studied abroad in college and almost didn’t graduate a year early and almost didn’t take that class with you and almost didn’t apply for the conference in New York. Although a lot of our story may seem accidental sometimes, when I think of these things, I’m always reminded that it was completely planned far in advance. Its beginnings, which are so obvious now, were laid out before I even knew you.

Square Cats and Lovesick Mice or Why I Shouldn't Ever Have Pets

Long before we were married, my husband informed me that he'd like to buy a pet rat after we're married. My response ("Negative, my dear man!") was certainly not surprising. But the reasons behind it might be a slightly more out of the ordinary: they're gross, they live in sewers and and barns, they escape from their cages on a nightly basis, we'd have to find someone to care for him while we travel, and, most importantly: I'm not ready for a pet.

See, there are some things I just know I shouldn't have: expensive technological gadgets, a head massager , the creepiest book ever, shoes with built in toes, and responsibility for household animals. All my pets just turn out to be lunatics.

The first four of these might make sense to you. I've had a computer set on fire, I would wear a head massager as a hat every day if I owned one, no one should own the creepiest book ever, and it is difficult to think of an article of clothing more ugly than toe shoes in the entire history of the world (and that includes argyle footie pajamas).

But pets? Well, it all started with Katie, Luther, and Gingerbread, my family's first (and last, my father ardently promised himself after the whole ordeal was over) rodent pets.

Katie and Luther were two white mice who lived on the left side of the glass cage that they shared with Gingerbread, our hamster who was not named after a historical religious figure. They all seemed quite happy with their living situation until Gingerbread managed to crawl over the wooden barrier that separated them and devour poor Katie. It was only days later that Luther died of a broken heart and Gingerbread died of indigestion.

It doesn't stop there, though. The next Christmas I received a gigapet, Digi, in our annual family gift exchange. To be honest, I played with him for two weeks or so, and then he went missing. Months later, I found him under my bed - dead. Suffocated in digital Digi poo. It covered the entire screen, in fact, and trust me, even a 7-year-old knows there is no recovering from that.

Then there was Kappy, our first and again, LAST cat. We would actually try to give the whole cat thing another shot about 8 years later, but our beloved kitten was absorbed (not kidding) while in utero by her mother, and therefore no longer available for purchase. But that's a different story.

Kappy started out as a small grey kitten that we adopted from my aunt and cousins. We happened to pick her up on my birthday, and so of course I began to say that she was mine. My family told me again and again that she was the whole family's cat... but it wouldn't be long before we swapped stories.

Kappy became as fat as she was long. She had evil green eyes that glowed in the dark, strange lumps all over her body, and a wretched character, comprable in my mind only to literary villianesses such as Grendel's mother and Medea. My brother Nate was her favorite, her favorite, and she woke him every morning by clawing at his body so that he'd climb out of bed to prepare her breakfast.

The worst, though, was staring into the darkness, and then sensing that the bedroom door was slowly opening. A strange smell would overtake the room and I'd force myself to peer over the bed. BAM! Green eyes stared back at me. She'd jump on top of me, make herself comfortable, and then just stare.

I'd lie there for what felt like hours, not daring to fall asleep for fear that if I moved at all, she'd claim my eyeballs and display them on her mantle over the fireplace in her evil fortress. Kappy died of a strange infection that I will not describe because it's disgusting, but I don't think a single family member cried about it or even missed her at all.

There are many more crazy pet stories - my escape artist turtle, my hermit crab, Javier, who was for all intents and purposes just a shell, and whose food smelled like death, our golden retriever Bilbo, who fully digested one of my favorite socks...the list goes on. And I'm certain it will continue to grow as I think I would like a dog someday. But for now, it's just my darling husband and I, and I think at this point that's all the craziness our new little home and landlady can handle.