So there I was in an America Online chat room, talking to this Republican lawyer from Arkansas. It was a few days before the 1992 presidential election, and I was trying to talk politics. He was trying to get me to go to a private room with him and talk about something else altogether. And then, here comes this Instant Message from somebody named TTiger, asking me if I'd ever worked at McDonalds.
As an opening line, it was less than filled with promise (Tony will break in about here and protest that it wasn't a line, it was a perfectly reasonable question, given that my screen name was MsMc and he'd worked as a McDonalds manager back in college). But whatever he said next was less odd and more interesting. Pretty soon, I was carrying on two conversations simultaneously--teasing the lawyer and fending off his persistent advances, and laughing with Tony about what a twit he was. And then I brushed off the lawyer so I could just talk to Tony.
He asked me if I'd like to talk on the phone. I'd been asked that lots of times before online (there were far fewer women on AOL then than there are now, so a female screen name guaranteed LOTS of attention) and I'd never said yes, but this time I did. It was getting late, so we made a date to talk the following night. And we did...for five and a half hours. And we did again the next night...for six and a half hours. And the night after that... Very quickly I found myself dazed, sleep-deprived and captivated.
After a few days we started to talk about meeting face-to-face. We exchanged photos and neither of us was scared off. So the day before Thanksgiving I got on a plane, feeling excited and terrified and not quite sure I believed that I was really doing this. The plane was packed and I was sitting way in the back in a window seat, so I was the very last person to get off, even after the crew. There stood Tony, looking very nervous (he'd started to wonder if I'd chickened out and not come) but cute as hell, holding a rose.
It was less than a week after I got home that we first said "I love you." We were talking on the phone nearly every night, sometimes for hours. Our long distance bills and AOL bills (this was when they still charged by the hour) got to be truly scary. We started to talk about how we were going to close the 1,200-mile distance between us. In January, less than two months after we'd met, I started applying for jobs in Seattle. Our reasoning was that it would be easier for me to find something there than for him to find work in Santa Barbara, where I was living. And besides, I already knew I loved Seattle, and I'd wanted to live there even before we'd met. It did seem a little hasty, but it's always taken me months and months to find a job in my field. We figured that, by the time I found something, we'd be sure we were ready.
Five weeks later I had an offer. It was a good job but not a great one. We wavered for, oh, about fifteen seconds before making up our minds. I took the job, packed up all my worldly goods and my two cats, and headed up I-5. I arrived six months to the day from when we'd met online. Adding up all times I'd visited, we'd been together in the same place for a total of about two weeks.
I was 34 when we met, and Tony was 29. Neither of us had ever been in a serious relationship, or even a potentially-serious one that lasted for more than a few weeks. I had wondered whether I was capable of it. I also had real doubts about whether I could have a successful relationship with a man (I think they're fine in the abstract, but when it comes to the day-to-day reality, I knew there were damn few that I could stand to be intimately involved with long-term--and who could likewise stand to be with me.) But when it happened, I never really seriously considered holding back or playing it safe. It just felt like the most natural, right thing in the world.
We got married for the first time on April 3, 1994, not quite a year after I moved to Seattle. I say "for the first time" because we got married twice. We'd been talking about it almost from the start--hedging our bets, but making plans that began with "if this works out and we stay together..." within days after we met. We made it official and got engaged Valentine's Day, 1994. We started planning our wedding for August. Then, at the end of March, Tony lost his job, and with it, his health insurance. I called the college's personnel office and found out it wouldn't cost us a dime to add him to my health plan if we were married (those were the days, weren't they?). So, without telling anyone, we went up to Whidbey Island for the weekend and got married. The only guest was a cat belonging to the crazy New Age minister who performed the ceremony.
Some people live together and tell people they're married when they're not, but we were married for four months while leading almost everyone to believe that we were still living in sin. I was having way too much fun planning the wedding to give it up, and we didn't want it to seem anticlimactic to the guests. So, on August 7, we got married again, before sixty or seventy of our friends and family, in a stealth pagan ceremony (pagan enough to suit us, but not so much that it sent Tony's very Catholic relatives or my very Baptist ones screaming out the door). The best comment was from one of Tony's cousins, who said that the ceremony was "so...interesting!" We went down the aisle to Pachelbel's Canon, and came back to the Grateful Dead's Truckin'. Afterwards, we took a lovely but too-short honeymoon trip to the Oregon coast.
And now, we're getting on with living happily ever after.
Here is one of our wedding pictures.
And here is one of my favorite photos of Tony, taken a few summers ago at the Furthur Festival in Eugene, and another taken at his company picnic, and one taken last summer at Whistler, B.C.
So what else can I tell you about Tony, besides that he's cute as hell and I love him wildly? He grew up in Portland. He survived Catholic schools. He used to play bass drum in a drum and bugle corps that toured and competed all over the U.S. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.S. in Sociology and History. He has a jail record (arrested for occupying the Federal Building in Eugene in a protest against apartheid in South Africa) and, he's fairly certain, an F.B.I. file. He's a Windoze user (but I've forgiven him for that) and just as much of a geek as I am. He works for Zones, Inc. (the people who bring you the Mac Zone and PC Zone catalogs) as Manager of Help Desk and Telecommunications. He prefers loud, headbanger rock and roll music, but he likes all sorts of other kinds, too. He does have the good taste to be a Deadhead. He thinks Stanley Kubrick is the most brilliant filmmaker ever. He has virtually every episode of every Star Trek series on tape, along with a few hundred hours of other TV shows and movies. He has a personal website at KarmaTruck.com. He's sexy as hell.
And he makes me very, very happy.
