"David who?"

I admit this was not the most auspicious way to start a conversation with the man who 13 months later I would marry.

His name was David Gale and we had gone to college together. I always had a thing for David Gale, with his sparkly blue eyes and perfect smile. But he was dating a dear friend of mine, whose name I no longer remember, so he was officially hands-off. Still, that didn’t stop us from becoming friends.

We spent hours together that year, sitting in the Union drinking beer and laughing at the same jokes, but (almost) never acted on our mutual attraction. Then, after one fateful night over winter break when we shared a brief but passionate make-out session in his car, I called the relationship off, and made a point of avoiding him on campus.

But I never forgot him. When I graduated and returned to Chicago I let go of most of friends, but I never stopped thinking about David. He was the guy I always thought I saw walking down the street, or sitting at the next table in restaurants, but it was never him.

Then, five years after graduating from college my phone rang.

“David who?”

In my defense I had been expecting a call from  an old friend from college, but due to poor message-taking skills on the part of my sister, I was expecting a call from a completely different David-from-college, who had a decidedly Korean accent and dropped all his articles. So my frame of reference for Davids from my past was all off.

The “David who?’ was not for having forgotten him, but for having expected someone else all together.

Thankfully,  he didn’t immediately hang up the phone. "David Gale," he reminded me again.

And then I knew.

We caught up on the phone that hot summer day. He had moved to Minneapolis with a girl who he'd just broken up with, and had just bought a house. I too had just ended a relationship and was living temporarily with my mother. It was fate.

Then he asked me out. He was coming to Chicago for a week on business, and wondered if I'd be free for dinner on August 7^th, which happened to be 26th birthday. Due to the recent breakup I had no plans.

"I'd love to," I told him.

He picked me up that night in a 20-year-old rebuilt pale yellow Fiat Spider with Seal wafting out of the speakers. My last date had been with a man who drove his mothers' station wagon, so this  night was already showing potential.

We sped down Michigan Avenue, breathing in the warm night air. He took me to a club where we listened to a band and talked all night. Then we sat on the rocks by Lake Michigan and kissed, and I remembered how much I loved his lips.

When I got home that night I announced that I had just gone out with the man I was going to marry.

I should point out here that I was not the marrying girl. I had never envisioned my wedding, or chosen bridesmaids. In fact I never intended to get married, or if I did I imagined it would be to a much older, much wealthier man whose children were already raised and gone. So falling head over heels in love with a man my own age who'd just bought a house in the suburbs of Minneapolis and dreamed of having children was a shock to me. It was a shock to everyone who knew me.

Yet there I was after just one date, dewy-eyed with love for this man, David Gale.

We embarked on an intense long-distance romance. Every weekend I drove to Minnesota or he flew to Chicago so we could be together at least two days out of the week, and we talked every night that we were apart.

By the holidays we were engaged. By my 27th birthday I was packing up my things and moving to Minneapolis. I started a new job on the 10th, returned to Chicago on the 22^nd, and got married in a beautiful ceremony at Cafe Brauer on the shores of Lake Michigan on August 25th, one year and 18 days after our first date.

We have since returned to Chicago where we are raising our two kids in the city, and I cannot imagine having chosen a better life than this.