Valentine's Day Memories
February 14, 1996
Hmm... I guess I was 24 at the time, and had no date and since my friend and I both had no one to spend the evening with and nothing better to do, we decided to do a male bonding thing and go eat huge steaks and drink lots of beer at Arthur's in Jersey. I picked him up in Flushing in the family Taurus and suddenly noticed greenish liquid dripping from the bottom of the car. So I called up my dad and told him about it, and he told me to put some water in the radiator. Now I had just gotten my driver's license a year ago and knew nothing about cars. So I got some water and popped the hood and my friend and I peered in. "Hey, is that the radiator?" "Yeah, maybe." I looked at him and he was as clueless as I was. So I unscrewed this cap and poured about a half-gallon of water into what I thought was the radiator. We climb back into the car and set out on the Grand Central Parkway. We had been driving for about ten minutes when we had this conversation:
"Dude, is that steam coming out of your car?"
"Oh, man, what the heck is up with this thing? I hate Tauruses."
"Maybe the car's overheating or something. Are you gonna pull over?"
"Wait, lemme try and get to a gas station."
"Okay. [pause] Y'know, I don't think that's steam. It kinda looks like smoke."
"Oh, man, this sucks."
"Maybe you should pull over, dude."
"Ok, ok, I can't see in front of me. Alright, here's an exit ramp..."
"[pause] There's some kind of light underneath the hood."
"Dude, that's fire."
At this point, we had made it onto the exit ramp, and we just got out of the car. For about five minutes, we watched as flames crawled out from under the hood and slowly began engulfing the car, making its way through the interior. This is apparently what happens when you pour a half gallon of water into the engine of a Taurus. I still maintain that if it were a better car, it would certainly have overheated and eventually stalled, but it should not have caught fire. We found a pay phone and called 911 and a fire truck arrived about 15 minutes later, and by that time the car was an inferno. No explosions, though. Since the gas tank is in the back, and the fire started in the front, it takes a while for the flames to reach the back. After it was burned to a crisp, I had it towed back to my house. We never got to eat steak that night.
February 14, 1998
Ok, so now I'm 26, and I'm about to head to a year-long mission trip to Japan in April, and I had been set-up on a long distance blind date by a GFC person. The girl that I was setup with lived in San Diego and I was assured that she was a great Christian, she was cute, blah, blah, blah. So we had begun e-mailing in December, and eventually graduated to the phone, and I finally booked a flight to San Diego to arrive on Valentine's Day to spend a week with her. We had gotten pretty close over the phone to the ridiculous point of talking about marriage. Now I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid. There's no way I would bring up marriage with someone I hadn't even seen and I had known only for a few months. But one day, we had a conversation on the phone that went like this:
"I really like you."
"How can you like me that much? You barely know me."
"I know it's only been a short time, but I feel like we really connect."
"You like me that much, huh?"
"I really think we're meant to be together."
"How much do you like me?"
"I miss you every day."
"Do you like me enough to fly out here and meet me?"
"Of course. I'm gonna come out there as soon as I can."
"Do you like me enough to marry me?"
"Umm... yeah..."
And that, boys and girls, is how you get into trouble. I mean, what else could I say? It would have ruined the moment to say, "Well, not that much." I wanted to like her that much, and wanting something goes a long way. Anyway, I was put in the curious position of thinking that I was flying out there to meet my wife for the first time. And though I tried my hardest to not imagine what she looked like, I couldn't help but form some kind of hot vague mental image of what she'd look like. So I fly out there on Valentine's Day, she meets me at the airport, and of course, she doesn't look like my wife. It's not that she was bad-looking, she just wasn't what I'd pictured, and naturally there was some major awkwardness, both on her part and mine. We had some coffee and it was already pretty late and we headed back to her place. Then things got really bad.
When we get to her apartment, I meet her roommate, and her roommate, well... she looked like my wife. But I had it under control, I wasn't going to do anything stupid. All three of us talked for a little bit and then we went to sleep, me on the living room sofa. In the morning, my "date" had to leave for church early in the morning, so I barely got a chance to talk to her. Both the roommate and I were going to churches that started much later, so we sat together and talked for a while. She offered to cook me some breakfast and as we talked, I knew I was way more attracted to this girl than my setup. But again, I wasn't planning on doing anything about it. And then...
And then the roommate did something I will remember for the rest of my life. I had brought with me a pair of brand new sneakers that a friend had given to me for Christmas, and I had never gotten a chance to use them and they were still in the box. It was getting to be time for me to go to church, so after we sat for a while, I went to my bag and brought out the box of sneakers to wear for the first time. I took one out and began lacing it, because they were brand new and still unlaced. She asked me what I was doing and I explained to her why I brought them. Then she paused, and without a word, grabbed the other sneaker from the box and calmly began lacing it. I can't properly describe the shock of that moment. It was a moment of such completely unexpected intimacy like I'd never experienced before. I had met her basically a few hours ago, and here she was suddenly, helping me without even bothering to ask, as if we'd known each other all our lives, as if she knew me and understood every thought that ran through my mind. Did I mention she was hot? So it was all over after this. I was head over heels in love...
Later on in the afternoon, when my setup got back, we got into some sort of weird argument over something and I left that night and stayed with my friend in L.A. for the rest of the week. But before the week was over, I called up her roommate and asked for her e-mail address and got it, never intending to contact her for at least a year (I was heading to Japan in two months and believe it or not, I figured it would be kind of unscrupulous to start e-mailing her right away). Well, a week after I got back from L.A., the friend who had set me up confronted me and asked me if I had asked her friend's roommate for her e-mail address. I confessed. It had taken about five days for the roommate to decide to tell my setup about my call to her. That's pretty much where the story ends. I did e-mail her about a year later, never got a response. I actually met her a year and a half later, but she was dating some dude. She did tell me though, that because of me, she and the girl I was setup with had a big falling out and stopped being roommates a few months after I left for Japan.
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