How We Met Blog Hop

I'm participating in Melinda Dozier's How We Met Blog Hop! Head on over and sign up. It doesn't start until June 30th (their anniversary). My anniversary was June 12th so I decided to post mine just a little earlier! I also broke the 100 word maximum rule.  Oops, what did you expect from a passionate writer?

So...How DID we meet?

He was stationed at Camp Lejeune, NC. I worked for my mother at The Rice Bowl Restaurant & Lounge. He used to come in for takeout every now and again. I didn't much care for him. I thought he was a little stuck up because he would come in, order food, drink one beer, and then leave. I don't even recall if he was a great tipper.

He would always talk to my mom. He was really nice to her, but no one else. Then one day he mentioned fishing.

My mother said, "What do you do with all the fish you catch?"

"We let them go," he said.

"No, don't let them go anymore. You bring them to me and I'll make you sushi." 

My mother didn't sell sushi in her restaurant because it was too expensive to keep freshly stored and we didn't have enough customers to keep the spoilage down. It was too much hassle for what it was worth.

So then he started coming in more often, bringing my mother fresh grouper and tuna, which she happily prepared for him and served on a bed of thinly shredded cabbage with a dab of wasabi mustard on the side. I didn't understand why my mother was so thrilled that this man would bring her fish and let her prepare sushi for him. He would just sit there, eat his food and have conversations with my mother while I sat there waiting for him to ask me for another beer.

"Diane, you should get him another beer. No charge his ticket, it's on me."

WTF??

Something was unsettling about him and I didn't know what it was, until the day I discovered who he was.

"So what's your MOS, marine?" Another customer asked him.

"I'm a CID agent."

"Ah, one of them." The customer dropped the questioning shortly after, and via my great communications skills, I learned the following: MOS was an acronym for Military Occupational Specialty and CID was an acronym for Criminal Investigations Division.

Mind you, at the time, I had access to the military base commissary, which means low cost, tax free, produce/meats. Being that we were a restaurant, what better place to conduct a black marketing sting operation, right? He was spying on me and my family! He'd been watching us, following us to see if we were utilizing the military facility to make unauthorized purchases for the purpose of redistribution for profit!

I was weary for weeks and I spent countless days and nights in a cold sweat over the whole conspiracy.

"Don't be silly, Diane." My mom tried to tell me what a great guy he was and that I should be lucky to find a man like him.

It took several weeks to rid myself of the paranoia to the point I could even like the man, but when I did start to like him, I really started to like him. Then, after getting to know him, I told him what I'd originally thought, that he was investigating me for black marketing.

He laughed and said, "We don't go looking for work. We have enough work investigating crimes we know about."

He laughed at me and laughed at me. Then he laughed at me some more. As a matter of fact, he laughed at me so much that I started to hate him again.

Alright, so I've always had this grandiose notion that I was somehow important enough for any number of shenanigans going on around me, but I sure as hell didn't need to be laughed at for it!

I got over it soon enough. I think he fell in love with me because I was that entertaining. I fell in love with him because he grounded me, which is something I desperately needed (and still do). Later, after we were married for several years, my mother would tell us that she was so thrilled because she knew she'd found the perfect match for her daughter, and she did.

June 12th of this year was our 25th wedding anniversary. So in celebration, I'm sharing some older photographs as well as an updated one we had taken while on our anniversary this past June.

This is me in  May of 1988, almost a year after we got married. 

Tim and our son, Cameron. This was around October 1989. Cameron was almost 1 years old.

This is Tim and me with Chelsey, Cameron and my late Grandmother.

June 2012, celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary!

If you are unable to participate, please share with us how you met your significant other. Just leave it in the comments below!