30 Years With Jamie

 

Jamie's 30th Birthday in San Diego

I met Jamie in fall of 1993 during a party off-campus at Trinity University in San Antonio.  We didn't start dating for about two years after that.  

When we met, both Jamie and I were college freshmen, me at University of Texas, and Jamie at Trinity.  My friends Denise and Madi, chums from high school and fellow Longhorns, drove us down for the evening as it was a Saturday in the dorms and we had no plans.  I called my brother in San Antonio and he knew of a party and knew Denise and Madi.  

No sooner had we arrived than I had enjoyed my first Goldschlager and Jagermeister.  Out of the crowd, other high school pal Erica appeared and introduced me to her suite-mate, Jamie, and my memory is that Jamie stepped in front of me and I got hit by that thunderbolt you read about but think is nonsense, something I'd say was a ridiculous bit of fiction had it not been my exact experience.  

It is very odd to have a moment that is going to change the entire trajectory of your life occur, but this was that.  

Immediately, I became acutely aware of my state, and that whatever tools I had for navigating speaking to this girl were nowhere to be found.  I was going to have to just bumble my way through.

Jamie was nice to me, and did talk to me solo, and just as I was about to ask her out, I leaned over and fell into a tree.  This I sort of remember, and there are details I can barely recall, but Jamie has made them very clear over the years.  I don't think she was horrified, but it was not exactly my smoothest moment.  So, I returned to Austin, with no date secured.

What I did not know that night was that Jamie was very ill, and would be taking the Spring semester off to get a kidney transplant.  It did, however, become a running joke with Jamie's roommates I knew from high school, that I had a huge crush on Jamie and I was not shy about it.

Over the next two years, as Jamie returned to school, I did see her here and there.  Sometimes I'd see her at Trinity when I'd visit Jason or my high school pals.  At one point, she and some buddies came to Austin and stopped over at my horrible apartment where we had out rat traps (because: rat).  A trap closed on Jamie's hard-toed-shoe, slipped off the curve and shot across the room.  Another time she joined my brother and me for dinner at a hamburger place.  We exchanged a few emails, etc...

I dated other people over time, but in early October of 1995, I was planning my Friday, watching X-Files as one did, when Jamie called me from a party off-campus in Austin.  She was at the apartment of yet other old high school pals' Paul and Nick, and with encouragement from Shannon and Erica, she'd been assigned to call me with the belief that I would show up if Jamie called.  And, of course I did.

We were at the party for a while, and then Jamie and I were sent to 7-11 for something.  And then left the party with a third wheel in her pal Justin to get some late night food, and all three of us crashed at my apartment.

A week later, Jamie came up, and we went to the October 14th Nine Inch Nails/ David Bowie concert at Southpark Meadows.  To add some zing to the experience, before the concert, my brother called and asked what I was doing.  When I was sketchy with details minus "David Bowie" he declared "I'm gonna grab a ticket" and hung up before I could tell him I was going on what I thought was a quasi-date.  So, Steanso was there on what was to be my first solo outing with Jamie, which Jamie doesn't count as a date, just a friendly hang. Or this post would be about how we started dating on the 14th.

Two weeks later, it was abundantly clear that, yes, actually we were going to date.  Jamie came up and we attended a birthday party for pal-Erica, and spent the weekend together.  A few days later, she came up for Halloween.  She was dressed as a nun. 

Jamie and I never did the dinner-and-a-movie thing, and there was no slow roll into figuring things out.  We were just together.  We swapped CDs from one another's collections, and we spent most weekends together, even though we were both very busy with school.  But it maybe even helped that Sunday to Thursday, we were in different cities so we could focus on studies.

Honestly, we just got along and it wasn't work.  She was super easy to talk to and want to support, and she was fun.  If you know Jamie, you know she doesn't go in for drama but doesn't shirk away from telling you what she thinks.  And at age 20, as it is today, that was wildly attractive.

I did learn some things the hard way, like - don't take Jamie to the mall at Christmas for a fun day out - she will absolutely get option paralysis and want to leave  And thus our first and last "fun" excursion for Christmas shopping occurred.  And she learned all the things I'm weird about, and yet hung out as I insisted she watch Batman cartoons.

But also, only two months after we declared ourselves a unit, Jamie was flying to Houston during winter break to meet my family and I was returning with her to her family's home in Oklahoma.  We jumped right in the deep end.

Sure, we had our usual relationship ups and downs.  Squabbles big and small, but we were on the same page the vast majority of the time.

Jamie has written extensively about her health issues over at her own blog, so I won't discuss that too much here, but it made for a very different dating experience.  We certainly had some weeks that were not ideal for enjoying your undergrad years.

In spring 1998, Jamie and I moved in together after graduation.  It was incredibly clear this was a permanent situation, and in April 2000, we were married, to absolutely nobody's surprise.

It's impossible to sum up what Jamie means to me in my life.  So I won't.  She makes me want to be the better than I am so I can at least pretend to be the person she sees.  And I am so very, very lucky to have found her.  Thunderbolts, team.  Pay attention to them.

30 years!  It's absolutely unreal how lucky I've been for three decades.  I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but if you meet someone as great as Jamie, I recommend you also spend every day together if you can.  Good stuff.

Love you, Jamie.