It’s Mr. RM’s birthday! Yes, he is old enough to be president now.

As he puts it, “Yes, my age has really been holding me back from that.”

I’ve been thinking today about how we met. It was sophomore year in college, and this is how it happened, with a few edits. From this post:

Put simply, fall of sophomore year was a warm steaming barrel of shit. Honestly. It was just a big pile of manure.

I spent the second half of freshman year, and the summer following, basically between a rock and a hard place. The rock was High School Guy, the hard place was Upperclassman Guy.

High School Guy was a year younger, dreamy and smart, an incurable poetry-writing romantic, with chin-length blond hair. Johnny Depp would play him in the movie, or possibly Orlando Bloom. High School Guy represents the kind of starry-eyed infatuation that everyone should experience in her youth.

Upperclassman Guy was two years older, whip-smart, funny, easy-going, and self-assured to a fault—he knew I had a boyfriend back home but pursued me with zeal nonetheless. Upperclassman Guy is the kind of “Good morning Mrs. Cleaver” guy that parents absolutely go nuts for. My dad adored him from the first time they met. Vince Vaughn would play him, I think.

Actually, here’s all you need to know:
High School Guy was a guitarist.
Upperclassman Guy was a drummer.
Anyone who’s ever gotten mixed up with either knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Now, for any of you out there thinking, Oh yeah, two people nuts over you and vying for your love, what a tragedy! Here’s the world’s smallest violinist playing the world’s saddest song, just for you… I would’ve thought the same, until I let both of them go during the Semester of Shit. It just got too horrible. High School Guy did the honorable thing and retreated into the background, which almost made me feel worse—in fact, we kept in touch on-again, off-again, throughout the fall, which was probably stupid, but then again, I was young and stupid.

Upperclassman Guy, for his part, started stalking me.

Well, I suppose you could say he harassed me, because he seemed to know just how far he could go without getting nailed for stalking. I lived on the first floor at the time. My desk was right by the window, which we often kept open in the cool of October, and sometimes he’d just pop up outside the window. He followed me around incessantly. Everywhere I went, he popped up. Pop! Pop! Pop!

Whenever he saw me talking to another guy—and this was often, since Rice was about 60% male at the time and most of my friends were guys—he wrote harassing notes and made snide, disgusting comments. During one of my on-again times with High School Guy, he and I were talking on the phone and Upperclassman Guy, knowing I was in my room talking to him, called incessantly, every few minutes, for the hour High School Guy and I were on the phone. Call waiting still makes me jump a little.

How did it end?

It finally ended with Upperclassman Guy when he finally lost interest in following me around and started dating another woman. They got married soon after graduation, and divorced eleven months later. I hear he’s an attorney now, married to a doctor, living in a swanky suburb in a southern city.

It finally ended with High School Guy when he just faded away. He lives in Hip and Hilly Texas and has a decent job and still plays music for fun. He has never married.

As for me, the coffeehouse on campus became my refuge during the Semester of Shit. For some reason Upperclassman Guy never followed me there. I’d typically go with Guy Pal and this other guy, a computer science major, sweet, introverted and totally harmless.

Guy Pal, Computer Science and I would often close down the place, and walk back to our dorm. Comp Sci Guy and I often ended up talking in my room, late into the night. Sometimes 3 or 4 in the morning. Wow! It was just easy. I honestly didn’t think anything of it (although you should have heard the trash Upperclassman Guy was talking).

One night Comp Sci Guy and I were studying in the study loft. The loft was a long attic room, and he was at a table on one side of a dividing wall, I was reading on the sofa on the other side. Suddenly, he appeared. He didn’t Pop! He was just present there. He sat down and said… well, I can’t remember what he said, but the gist was that he liked me, a lot, and just wanted me to know that.

It wasn’t dreamy guitar poetry, but it wasn’t self-assured zeal drumming against my brain either.
It was just quiet and straightforward and nice.

A few weeks later I heard a beautiful instrumental piece, a song that I didn’t know the words to—I now know it is from the musical Godspell, and it says,
“All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.”

Comp Sci Guy played it for me,
on the piano.
And that’s how it ended for me.

And began.

So happy birthday, dear Comp Sci Guy. Now Husband Guy, Father of Almost Three Guy, Sixteen Years Later Guy.

Who would have thought?