I hesitated between perfect and good. I chose perfect, although it wasn’t quite.
I was 17 1/2, having just finished HS with a good but not exceptional record. I had been admitted to several schools, but with no scholarship and no prospect of paying. It was before the era of student loans. I was scanning the newspaper help wanted ads, looking for a summer job while deciding what next. I saw an ad for a lab assistant. It looked interesting so I called and made an appointment. It turned out to be a local university. When I got there they explained that it was no just a summer job, but a scheme where you worked full time and took courses part-time in the night school. The idea was that you took 9 credits during each school term and 3 during each of the two summer terms for a total of 24 each year and, after five years, 120 credits and a degree. Obviously, nothing better was going to be coming along and I jumped at the chance.
But there was more. I had been intending to study chemistry but after a year as a lab tech, I decided I really didn’t enjoy lab work. One evening (I usually worked evenings to make up time for when I took an occasional course in the day school) early in my second year there when I was enrolled in calculus 1, I overheard two graduate students discussing a strange kind of math. I went over to find out what they were talking about. It turned out one of them had already taken and the other one was currently taking a course in modern algebra and the second one was having trouble with an exercise. I got interested and then fascinated and signed up for that same course a year later. At the end of that year, I was a mathematician. I now realize that that year course was fully the equivalent of a graduate course in modern algebra and still have occasional contact, 65 years later, with the professor. I did apply for and got, a scholarship (accompanied by a loan) to go full time in my fourth year. And then became a TA for my fifth, graduating half-way through and continuing in grad school. After 3 1/2 years, I had a PhD and then teaching positions, research papers, wife and three kids, 6 grandchildren, all the result of that random newspaper ad.
Sure, and that’s how it usually happens, let’s say 99% of the times. But for the pupose of this thread, I was really interested in examples where a wonderful opportunity is served to you on a platter. This is much more rare, and more striking I think.
I had been invited to a friend’s birthday party, but was feeling depressed and wasn’t sure if I wanted to go and interact with people. I was walking around at a street fair early the day of, and saw some Silly Strings for sale at a booth. I thought my friend would like them, so decided to go. “Maybe I’ll meet someone”, I thought. I went and mingled. Fairly late in the evening I was next to the keg talking to a couple of guys I’d met, and a woman with a beautiful smile and infectious laugh started talking with us. One of the guys, who was a friend of hers, introduced us. In the course of the conversation she found out I had a motorcycle, and asked if she could have a ride. “Tomorrow”, she said. I wasn’t sure she’d actually show up, but she did. 26 years later, we’re together. It’s taken work, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Do you honestly not understand that this looked NOT like love, but rather like mutual psychotic obsession?
It is not normal to propose to somebody you’ve barely met. The fact that you turned out to be luckier than any other lottery winner in history (and make no mistake–you were playing the lottery; not with money but with your hearts, minds, and perhaps even your literal lives) is no excuse for your failure to recognize why others reacted the way they did. Standing on the extreme edge of a tall, crumbling cliff is scarcely any riskier than what you did.
That makes sense to oppose the marriage when they first got married. But this line:
suggests that they were still psychotically opposed to the marriage years later, after it should have been fairly obvious that it did, in fact, work out in the end.
I’ve had two times - in the past few years - when women who would have been highly suitable mates fell into my lap and I let them get away both times because I realized too late. I kick myself over it every day.
My wife and I had just had our first child and were renting on one of the few busy streets in our college town (moving here was also a “stars aligning”). There was no yard, and I imagined our children wandering into the street.
Though we’d never imagined ourselves home owners, we started looking, but soon gave up. We were at a book study at church, and the tangent that night became us bitching about the housing market: “Are there NO affordable houses around?”
That was Sunday night. Tuesday morning, my wife calls me at work:
“Pastor Mal walked into the church office, announced they were moving out west, and a couple of people said “Call D&C, they need a house!” He says we can buy it cheap if we can buy it fast.”
“Okay… but I have no idea where they live.”
“Me neither, it’s some street called Derry…”
“We’ll take the house.”
I’d worked with a guy who would wax poetical about his hidden little street that dead-ended at a park on a lake. Which I’m looking at now, sitting on my porch with my breakfast.
I’ve barely scratched the surface. One of the things received on our 20th wedding anniversary was an offer to pay all the legal expenses if we would get divorced.
Were you at all tempted to hire the most expensive lawyers possible, contest every aspect of the divorce so at to drive up the cost as high as possible, finally get divorced, and them immediately re-marry? Because at that point, I think I would have been. Costing people like that as much money as possible feels like a good thing to me.
Darn close to perfect, for me. Mine wasn’t a particular moment, though- it was one instigating moment and a path that followed from there.
My older cousin gave me a copy of AD&D for Christmas when I was eleven years old.
When I was about thirteen, I met a guy who would become my childhood friend, and we started to play D&D together, using the set my cousin gave me. Eventually, we branched out to other games, including a game called Villains and Vigilantes (a superhero RPG, written and illustrated by Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham). I always liked to draw, so I would use Jeff’s art in that book to practice.
My mother died five years later, and I moved to Austin to live with my aunt and uncle. I made a new set of friends through a local game store, and continued to play all sorts of tabletop games. One guy, Ben, saw that I liked to draw while we played and knew that I was good with working on computers, so he asked his new employers to give me a chance at the video game company they were starting up.
When I went in for the interview, it turned out that they’d already hired one artist, and he would be critiquing my work. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be Jeff Dee- the artist who was my initial inspiration when I was a kid.
Since then, I’ve been in the game industry for coming up on 25 years now- the average career lifespan of a game developer is only about five years. I’ve moved all of the US, and I now live in Canada, all due to the Christmas present my cousin gave me when I was eleven years old.
Looking for a place to retire/relocate near our daughter (who’d settled down on the other side of the US), the realtor showed me an old farm house, 25 minutes from her, that had been empty and for sale for five years. It had unlimited access to hiking and riding trails, five acres of cleared pasture, and a nearly-new 3 horse stable (I have two horses). The price had just then been lowered more than $200K (the main reason it had stood empty was that the seller thought it was worth a lot more than anyone else did). It seemed too good to be true. I talked to my husband and put in an offer the next day. So did another potential buyer – the first two real offers in all that time. But we had cash, so we got it.
And it wasn’t too good to be true, but it’s dang close. Been here four years and I still pinch myself.
