It was my senior year of college on a Thursday night, when the weekend festivities were just getting started. I walked up to the bar to buy my friends some drinks.
This old college restaurant and bar was smoky and dark, with wood walls, pool tables and a great outdoor patio with lights strung from end to end and benches that would give you splinters if you weren’t careful. And cheese fries that were the perfect remedy for any college hangover. The place is famous now, and despite the fact that it has become more of a commercial enterprise than a hole in the wall, it sure brings back good memories.
At any rate, I’m guessing Bye Bye Miss American Pie had just finished playing – that was the song that would make the entire bar stop what they were doing and sing along. And for some reason it always made me want to buy my friends another round of shots (Rattlesnakes to be precise).
I was rather generous with my new credit card that some smart creditor was willing to offer me as a college student who worked 12 hours a week as a Party Pics Photographer.
At any rate, I noticed he was at the bar too, apparently ordering shots for his friends as well. Looked like we had something in common right off the bat. I couldn’t remember his name but I knew him from my 8:30 am Intro to Speech class the last year where he sat a few rows in front of me. My roommate who was in the class knew him and briefly introduced us in the stairwell one day. She knew I thought he was cute. I remember watching his hat fall off after he fell asleep in class and jolted his head as he woke.
Our drinks were ordered and I glanced over. “Don’t I know you?” I asked. (I know, so typical, I just blurted it out.)
“Oh yes, I remember,” he said as he turned toward me. (Later I learned that he had absolutely no recollection whatsoever of meeting me. Clearly, based on the hat incident, he was barely awake for that 8:30 am class.)
It was a busy night and it was taking a while to get our drinks. There was a sketchy Hungarian tennis player with a strong accent and bad teeth who had been hitting on me and was hovering around the bar. Who knows why in the world a Hungarian tennis player was going to college in Oklahoma, but I digress. I tried not to make eye contact.
I leaned in toward him. “Hey, would you mind acting like we’re together for a second?” Again, it just came out as I asked this cute guy who pretended to remember me to cover as my boyfriend. He looked confused but I asked him to just go with it. He played along and put his arm around me. (I know this sounds like the perfect pick-up method, but I swear it was not my original intent.)
Six months later, after a lot of grief from my friends who remembered me saying that I would be so old when I married that I’d need a cane to get down the aisle, we were engaged. Another four months later, we were married.
Twenty two years and two kids later … we’re still buying our friends shots.
(This is part of a blog hop How I met my husband from GenerationFabulous)
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