It was obscenely early on Thanksgiving morning at O’Hare International Airport and I was headed home to New York.  I couldn’t possibly have looked worse.  I had just pulled two all-nighters for school, was wearing a mans sweater which reached my knees, and black jeans that had really seen better days.  How was my hair?  In an unceremonious wad on the top of my head.  It was not an ideal situation for meeting ones true love, but hey!  It worked!

            My fellow passengers and I sat crammed like sardines waiting for the plane to take off, but for some reason, we weren’t moving.  Finally, the reason for the hold up came bursting through the door in the form of a frazzled looking young man who avoided our dagger stares like a champ as he bustled down the aisle and stopped at the seat across from me.

            I couldn’t help but smirk as he banged his head on the overhead bins before untangling himself from his bags and finally sitting down.  He caught my smirk and started to give me a dirty look before seeing the humor in the situation and smiling back.  The first words he said to me were “this sucks.”  I couldn’t help but laugh and agree.

            We chatted the whole flight and it turned out that he was a Navy man.  He asked for my number and I obliged because the combination of a sailor and an art student was too funny to resist.  I wrote “that chick from the plane” underneath my name and he chuckled.  I responded with, “well I don’t know how many numbers you’ve gotten today…you ARE a sailor after all.”  He turned red and denied any such thing, but for the record:  I was the fourth number he had gotten that day!  Player…

            We started dating immediately after Thanksgiving break and got married a year and a half later. This past May, we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. Can you believe it? I’ll save the “oh crap we need to elope right now because he’s getting deployed to Japan for two years” story for another post.

Until next time,

Liz