A Transatlantic Love Story, Part I: London-Bound Girl

Photo reblogged from yehyehgrace: Buckingham Palace in the 1950’s

A friend recently said that I must write about how I met my husband. “I thought you met in Berkeley,” she said. Nope. I’m actually stealing Yeh Yeh Grace’s photo to begin our love story because it starts only a few London Tube stops away from where this gal is standing. Feel free to imagine me in this outfit and living in the 1950s since it makes it more romantic, but shed about forty years off her age. I was actually only twenty-years-old and we’d just begun a new millennium.

My mother’s final words before putting me on a London-bound flight were, “Don’t date!” I didn’t take her seriously. Who takes their mother seriously at twenty? Only three weeks before I had called off an engagement to the on-again-off-again boyfriend of six years. He proposed to me on a rock’s ledge where a waterfall trickles in the spring and summertime. He said we would get married and live in the town where we’d went to high school. We’d have boys, he’d coach them in football and baseball, and we’d go to all of their games. When the boys were grown we’d buy an RV and travel across the country seeing the world. Imagining that life made me want to throw myself off that cliff. He meticulously detailed every imaginable fear I had for my future. I wanted to see the Great Wall of China. I wanted to see Rome. I wanted to have girls, goddamnit, and I never wanted to own an RV. After I’d figured out the politest way to do it, I said no. He told me if I was holding out for a man that didn’t watch football on Sundays then I would die a lonely woman. I think I was also called a bitch, then I got on a plane and landed in London.

Now I’m no Pioneer Woman but this story will take some time, more than my sleepy eyes can write in an evening.

Spoiler Alert: A Christian Midwestern truck driver’s daughter marries a Jewish London accountant’s son on a rainy August day in 2003, and this is how that story begins.