Our life – A Monthly View of the Ups and Downs

We celebrated our 34^th Wedding Anniversary on August 11, 2018.  Our relationship has been an adventure from the start.  I will share our story with you about once a month over the next 12 months as we prepare for our 35^th Anniversary.  Our story is full of ups and downs, and I will be very open about our life.  I think that the combination of these things makes our relationship so wonderful.

How we began –

The Year:  1980

The Place:  McDonald’s in Nashville, Tennessee – back when it was a cool and fun place to work

A rocky start

I had only been working at this McDonald’s for a few days.  I hadn’t really gotten to know very many people.  One of my first encounters with my husband came with us standing over the fry station.  His friend said he should “go say something to her” and this is what he came up with – “Is it true what they say about girls from California?”  That went over like a ton of bricks.  Neither one of us can remember if I said anything but knowing my personality he got some sort of snappy comeback like “well, now you will never know” and of course, he got my famous “look” – the one the says you really can’t be that stupid.  He walked back to his friend in the grill area and said, “well that was a disaster”!

After that, we were friends and we stayed that way for about a year and half.  We loved working at McDonald’s and had a great time there.  People often said we should date and David kept after me to go out with him.  It was my hesitation.  You see, he was a senior in high school and I was a college freshman.

I will say that David was much more mature than most of the guys we worked with and pretty much all the guys that I was in school with.  I had been in a relationship during high school and I wasn’t really ready to date just one person, so we remained friends.  We did things in “groups” with the people we worked with.  We always laughed and have many fond memories of the people we worked and hung out with.

From the beginning, we had this “banter” back and forth between us.  We would sort of poke fun or pick on each other but not in a mean-spirited way.  This part of our relationship remains with us today.

Finally, David and some of our co-workers decided that he should date my sister, Angie.  Well, I was not sure how I felt about that.  She was 3 years younger and I told him that he was too old for her.  So he said to me for the hundredth time, “then we should go out”.  I thought about it for a bit and we finally went on our first date in February 1982.

We went to the “Outdoor Show” at the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Nashville.

It had lots of campers and camping equipment, boats and all things outdoors.  David’s family went camping a lot and I had been several times with my family.  This doesn’t sound very romantic, but it was perfect for us.  We were very relaxed with each other and by the end of the night, we were already talking in terms of “we”.  “We” were going to go camping, “we” were going to do this or that.

I was very at ease with David.  He was a gentleman and looked out for me.  Something I had not realized that was very important to me.  So within a few days of that first date, we decided to exclusively date and our future began to take shape.

To be continued…

Kim

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