How We Met

One of the first things someone will ask when I introduce Jason, is "How did you meet?" It's a very simple question, really, and this person is expecting the simple and true answer that I will give them: "Through friends."

But it always gives me a moment of pause, a moment of my life flashing before my eyes, and the parts of his that I've learned of so far, and I want to start at the beginning, the very beginning: when he was born, and when a few years later, I was born, and all the circumstances ... where he lived, where I lived, that we did not live near enough to each other to meet at the wrong time.

His grandfather introducing him, as a boy, to a great love of nature, a great blue heron just around the bend of their path, his head turned to their footsteps, wings quivering in readiness to leap into the air, and into a boy's heart. My dad taking the little green paperback dichotomous key around the backyard so that we could key out the apple tree, the ash, I still remember standing under the ash tree with the leaves in my hand, and it was a new and exciting game to know that this was not just any tree.

We both loved dinosaurs, and for some reason, the stegosaurus. Perhaps we were both pacifists from early on, going for the vegetarian one. When he was catching dragonflies, I was catching fireflies, and I left mine on the picnic table overnight in a jar, and coming back the next morning to grave disappointment, while he raised his more mercifully in an acquarium.

And then there were the hardships and heartbreaks we endured, each with its lonely pain, where knowing that the other person just existed might have made things tolerable. But without that knowlege, with no crutch to stand on, we learned so much more, and became who we are. We learned we are fragile, but we endure. There were our almost-loves, our almost-forevers, and when they ended, we had to trust that was for a reason, one that we wouldn't know for a while.

I don't know, yet, what inspired Jason to first love and write poetry. But I didn't like poetry at all until my senior year of high school, when I had an influential teacher named Mr. Brown who introduced me to the modern poets. Perhaps if I hadn't been able to love and appreciate poetry, I wouldn't have been able to love and appreciate Jason, since it is so much a part of him.

And then there were the moments that turned the trajectories of our lives in wild directions, but directions toward each other none-the-less. A moment on a mountaintop in Colorado for Jason which made him reconsider what was important to him. A moment in an ordinary hallway for me, when I was introduced to the first soil scientist of my life, who happened to be looking for summer help.

And there was a time when we were very far apart, in California. I loved it there. I had a life there. But something called me back - my family, a job waiting for me. But maybe something else, too. In fact, it always felt like Cali was temporary for me, from the day I arrived.

And then our mutual friends -- only two degrees apart we were, for many years. Our email addresses in mass emails inviting us to things were nearer to each other than we ever were. Thank goodness Susie came to work at Argonne. Thank goodness Susie's father knew our boss at Argonne from college. Thank goodness I came back to Argonne and met Susie, and that Susie knew a certain Kelly B., who knew a certain boy. And thank goodness we didn't meet sooner. We both agree that timing could have hurt us.

So how did Jason and I meet? Maybe next time I should be ready with the answer I feel is closest to the simple truth: "A miracle."