Second Guesses

Go on--- Second guess yourself, you're probably wrong. I am most of the time.

Had a conversation last night with a friend of mine about her boyfriend... It led to my telling this story-

My mother and father went to college at Auburn many years ago. To hear my mother tell it, my father was kind of girl crazy. The way it worked then was that you dated around. If you didn't have a steady you could take one girl or boy to a party this weekend and another the next, no big deal. Now that doesn't imply that everyone was hooking up with everyone else, just a much more casual dating enviroment. Probably because everyone wasn't hooking up at the end of their dates. If things got more serious you would get pinned. That was basicaly having a serious steady girl. You would give the girl your fraternity pin and she would wear it on her collar to show the world that she was the girlfriend of a Sigma Chi or whatever affiliation you happened to have. Getting lavaliered was next but does nothing for this story so we'll skip it. Apparently my father got pinned a lot in his college career. There are all kinds of stories of the college craziness. Cars with rusted out floorboards from icing down beer in the floor so many times over the four years and such. Sounds like a good time was had by all.

Well, at some point in their college life my father and mother went out a few times. According to my father he was very taken by my mother. According to her she never really took him seriously because of his reputation. For what ever reason things never really took off. My father graduated and moved to Atlanta to persue a job in the banking industry. When my mother graduated she was faced with returning home and did the only reasonable thing. She married. I'm a little fuzzy on the details here but seems like they had grown up in the same city and it kind of made sense. Anyway, evidently he was not a very good husband, he cheated and the relationship crashed. The marriage lasted less than a year.

Now my mother faced with a full life in front of her picked herself up and made a new plan. She decided to move to Atlanta. She had friends there and was planning to go to graduate school. She went to stay with her friends, find a place to live, a job, you know everthing involved with getting settled.

Now here's where the story gets interesting. My mother has a job interview, it should finish around five so she arranges to meet the friends she's staying with at a popular resturant on Peachtree. The weather's terrible, pouring rain. The interview didn't go that well. Her friends are running late and the restaurant is packed. There's a wait and no room in the entryway. One of those days. Across the street is an office building that has a glass front entryway. She darts across the street and huddles there hoping to see her friends when they arrive. Feeling like a drowned rat she just wants to cry.

Next thing she hears is a man's voice. "Nelda?" (Nelda, that's my mothers name. Pretty cool huh?) She turns to look into my father's eyes. From here the story speeds up. My father breaks up with the girl he's dating at the time. (If he's had to much wine he'll tell you in confidence that she had an amazing ass, if not he'll say she was a nice girl.) They meet for coffee, then lunch, then another, then dinner, a short three years later they're married. Not so simple but they got there.
My father believes beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was ment to be. That they were ment to be together and that God or whoever is in charge of those things would have put them in front of each other as many times as it took for them to get their shit together and make things work. They have, for over thirty years. Not always well, relationships are hard and people struggle but to this day they love each other more than anything in this world and are best friends to boot. They have, and have had the best married relationship I've ever seen. Drive each other crazy, frustrate the hell out of one another, and love each other so deeply that it glows.

Meant to be... Let the forces that guide your life put you where you are supposed to be and run with it. Feel like I'm always stealling lines from friends. No original thoughts here I promise. Everything will be ok in the end, if it's not ok you're not at the end.