How I met Joseph's father

9 years ago today, I met Richard. It wasn’t the first time I had seen him. I was VERY aware of his existence long before we actually spoke. Today I am going to take a little break from the Joseph-focus of this blog to tell you how we met. After all, if we hadn’t met, there wouldn’t be a Joseph to blog about.

Our “story” actually begins several months before May 2000. I can’t tell you specifically the date I first saw Richard (I know it was sometime in the 2nd semester of my freshman year at Georgetown and I know I was dating someone else at the time…so it had to be January or February of 2000) but I can see the moment in my head like it happened 10 minutes ago. I was eating dinner at New South cafeteria (WARNING to my non-Hoya readers: there will be a lot of G-town references that will be meaningless to you) with my friends when I looked up and walking straight towards me was this incredibly handsome, impeccably dressed guy. Georgetown is a preppy school but even with its preppy standards, he was really well dressed – dress pants and shoes, collared, buttoned-up shirt. Anyone who knows me knows I am a sucker for a well-dressed man. I vividly remember thinking in my head “If I wasn’t dating someone else, I would be so interested in that guy.”

Flash forward to say early March and I am now single. I continued to see Rich constantly at New South cafeteria…..we were clearly on the same dinner schedule and I often saw him at late night (the cafeteria re-opened at night from like 9-11pm and would have pizza and desserts). Somewhere in this time frame I became slightly obsessed with him. I told all my friends that I was going to marry him and he would be the father of my children. We would sit at dinner and make-up stories about the life that he and I would have together. I didn’t even know what his name was. The only thing I knew was that he was on the track team because he often came in his practice uniform with the rest of the team to dinner. My micro-econ binder that semester had “I love Track Boy” all over it with hearts around it (I was 18 ok…that’s a perfectly normal behavior for an 18 year old).

At some point I decided I needed to remedy the fact that I did not know my obsession’s name. I just want to state that this is the point in the story where Rich tells people my crush veered off into the stalking classification. The only piece of information I had was that he was on the track team. I went online and looked up the track team roster. I was working at the housing office on-campus which conveniently had filed away every freshman year facebook (like a year book for each class of incoming freshman). I took out the 1996-1999 freshman facebooks and started cross referencing with the track team roster until I found him – his name was Richard and he was from Charlotte, NC. A Southern boy…despite the fact that Georgetown boasts having students from every state and like 63 countries enrolled, its still about 75% Northeastern and a southern boy is somewhat of a rarity.

This wasn’t really enough information for me and I proceeded to look up his housing information using my access to the housing database at my job. Things got a little tricky here because Richard is actually his middle name but his housing information was filed under his first name, Joseph. After a little creative digging, I discovered this and was successfully able to find out where he lived on campus. It was conveniently located in Village A apartments, which was next to New South cafeteria and made it very easy for frequent trips walking by on our way to dinner every night.

Somewhere between the staring at him in the cafeteria and walking by his apartment on a daily basis, Richard got the idea that I might be interested. At some point Richard obviously decided he was interested in me as well. (I will leave it up to him if he would like to re-tell his version of events leading up to May 4th).

On May 4th, we were in the midst of our 5 day no-class break to study for finals. It was gorgeous weather and I cuted myself up and headed out to Healy lawn with my accounting text book (I know – accounting text books will turn on a guy on!) and my best friend, Erin to get my study on. “Study” is a term used loosely during spring study break. It mostly involves girls in tiny tank tops (and the occasional bikini top) sitting outside tanning, some volleyball playing, some Frisbee throwing, but not really much studying. But of course I was studying VERY, VERY hard. At some point I looked up from my super-cool textbook and saw Richard walking in my direction. I never expected he was actually coming to talk to me…I simply thought he would walk right past me. So imagine how my heart nearly fell out of my chest when he stopped in front of me, introduced himself and sat down to talk. We talked for nearly 20 minutes about randomness before he had to leave for track practice. In my flustered state I never even introduced him to Erin or asked for his number.

(Healy Lawn)

However, the next day I headed back out to the lawn and luckily saw Richard again. I think we spent most of the day together…as we did every day afterwards. Of course, we only had a week before we were both headed home for the summer. We had our first official date a few days later. Dinner on the waterfront at Sequoias, ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s and sitting on a roof in Village A talking and looking at the monuments. We spent every possible moment together that week. I studied very little for finals (That accounting class I was studying for when we met….went into the final with an A, ended up with a B+. Which to this day I remind Rich of the fact that that downgrade was the difference between the 3.67 Cum Laude I graduated with and the and 3.70 Magna Cum Laude I could have graduated with).

(Sequoias)

At the end of the week, I headed home. We talked on the phone or via AOL IM everyday that summer. He even came to NY and went to Cape Cod with my family for our summer vacation and I headed to Miami/Palm Beach for a week for his family’s summer vacation. By the time we got back to Georgetown in late August, we were officially a couple. We spent the year together and then Rich graduated and we were forced to do the long distance thing for 18 months while I was in DC and he was in Charlotte. I made frequent long weekend trips to Charlotte. In the summer of 2002 I came to Charlotte for the summer and he popped the question that July. I went back for my senior year with a diamond ring and a wedding planning binder. I graduated a semester early in December 2002 and continued with our wedding planning all spring. In May, I officially walked and graduated from Georgetown and 2 weeks later we were married at the Hall of Springs in Saratoga, NY.

(Hall of Springs)

And of course, the rest is history….

(I have a lot of pictures of Rich and I and our early dating years and from our wedding but none are digital. Given Rich's unemployed state, we don't have access to a scanner so I had to go with some stock internet photos).