I met Garry in the spring of 1998 when he came to interview for a job as Director of Finance at NIAOM. Second interviews there were pretty chatty and informal, mostly an excuse for the rest of the staff to get acquainted with the candidate they'd already decided to hire. Somebody asked Garry where he was from, and he said something about "a little town in northern California." It was really the way he said it that got my attention--in the same tone I use when what I'm really thinking is "You've never heard of it, or if you have, you're just going to say something inane like 'Yeah, I drove through there once, and boy, it sure was hot!' So let's just leave it at that, okay?" So I asked him, "What town?" And he said "Redding" and next thing you know we were both singing the Shasta High Fight Song (and my coworkers were looking at us like we were freaks).
It qualified as a "cute meet" by Hollywood standards, but for a while that's as far as it went. Oh, I liked Garry, thought he was cute, but I always thought that office romances were really risky. Over the next few months we got to be friends, but it didn't go past a few chats in the office and an occasional lunch. I was intrigued by the idea that he lived on his sailboat, but I was only one of several people in the office who were angling for an invitation to go out sailing with him. I was a little miffed when I found out he'd invited a couple of our co-workers and their partners, before he invited me--but it didn't stop me from hinting a little harder and getting invited myself next time. We didn't both have a weekend day free for several weeks, so we set a date for the end of September. In the meantime, we started having lunch together more often. I started to wonder if Garry was flirting with me. Then I started to hope he was. I knew I was flirting with him. I kept waiting for him to invite other people along on our sailing trip, but he didn't.
Sailing with him was heaven. It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. I'd been stressed beyond belief at work for weeks, trying to get ready for the new school year, and school had finally started. It was lovely just to lay back in the sunshine and relax and do nothing, worry about nothing. I started out the day wondering if Garry intended to make a move on me. I kept waiting for it, but as the day went on, I thought about it less and less. We were having such a good time, it just didn't matter so much anymore. Finally, as the sun was starting to set, we headed back in through the locks. As soon as we tied up Garry asked me if I wanted to open a bottle of wine. I said sure. We sat around and drank it and talked and talked. When it was gone, we opened another and drank that, too, and talked, and talked. I wondered if Garry was going to make that move. Finally...I made the move.
Tony and I have always had an open relationship. I don't think we really knew what we were getting into when we started, but we've never had any regrets. There aren't many role models or roadmaps that told us how to make this work, so we've had to figure out a lot as we went along. When Garry came along, we had to learn how to accommodate another relationship in our lives. It wasn't always easy, but we've made it work. It was even less easy when Garry met someone else, and I was the one who had to do the accommodating (nobody ever said feelings pay attention to what's logical or equitable). And we learned why office romances are so risky. But again, we managed to work it all out. Tony makes me very, very happy, and so does Garry. I love them both. They're both quite content with the way things are. It's not an arrangement that would work for everybody, but we wouldn't have it any other way.
It's almost like Garry and I knew each other a long time before we finally met. We grew up in the same little town, went to the same junior high and high school, had some of the same teachers, even. Oh, he graduated 16 years before I did, and he'd gone off to college before I started kindergarten, so we wouldn't have had much to say to each other if we'd met there. But we can talk now about eating hamburgers at The Shack, or watching trains on the Sacramento River bridge, or feeding the deer at Shasta Dam, and no further explanation is necessary. There's something very comfortable and connected about that. Our paths have crisscrossed in other ways, too. Garry was a train nut even as a kid, and he used to hang out sometimes around the old Southern Pacific depot--and probably ran into my father working there, at least once or twice. I came back to Redding after my first year of college and got a summer job with the California Division of Forestry, and my boss was Garry's father. When Garry graduated from college, he got his first job at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which then occupied a glorious old building at 600 Stockton Street in San Francisco. When I graduated from college, I got my first job at Cogswell College, which then occupied the same glorious old building at 600 Stockton Street in San Francisco (it's now the Ritz-Carlton). Who knows what else we'll discover if we keep this up?
Like I said, Garry lives on his boat, Jovanna (his last boat, Raven, is no longer with us) with his petite 25-pound cat Goose. Being on a boat suits him--I've never seen him more relaxed or at home anywhere else. He's a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary (here's a picture of him in his dress uniform, with me, at an Auxiliary banquet), and he spends a lot of time volunteering with them, doing safety patrols (here he is, doing crowd control while the Blue Angels fly at Seafair) and teaching boating safety courses. He's a Distinguished Alumni of Shasta High School. He started out at Shasta College and ended up at San Francisco State University, where he got a B.A. in English Literature. He's still a train nut and a big proponent of rail transportation. He's a PC geek (how do I keep getting mixed up with these Windows users??) and he loves playing with toys like his digital camera. He likes Black Butte Porter and breakfast at Salmon Bay Cafe. He's been married twice, has three grown kids. He's incredibly sexy. He's going to be part of my life forever. I love him a lot.
