Our Story BONUS: His Perspective

That's right folks, in what he would likely call a moment of weakness, he agreed to do a small post in conjunction with my series for your reading pleasure.

I simply asked him to write anything he wanted relating to our relationship: a memory, a funny story or anything else he wanted to share.

Without further adieu, I present Al:

I first met Mel a little over 5 years ago when we were working in the same building, I had been working in another plant down the road and had recently transfered for a promotion to the plant that she worked at. I was working in the shipping dept. and she would come out of the office to check on special orders that needed to be handled appropriately to please the customer.

I remember a particular time that she came out one evening to check if one of these "special orders" was going to ship out. The department before me had screwed something up on the order and I had to send it back to be fixed, so I told her that I would do everything in my power to get it out on the next truck, even if I had to drive it to UPS myself. This was a friday night and she was going to drive back to her parents that evening for the weekend, so she gave me her phone number so that I could call her and tell her if it made it out in time. She made sure that I understood that she was only giving me her number for business reasons and I was pretty sure that she was involved with someone else at the time anyway, but I am not going to lie and say that my attraction to her at this point was strictly plutonic. She was with someone else and I was working a million hours a week at work and helping my father on the farm, plus I didn't think that my hick ass would ever have a chance with a beautiful city girl like that.

A few months past and we talked more and more, I think she may have even been yelled at for being out on the production floor so much. One day a guy that worked for me invited me to a party at his appartment and after carefull consideration (who am I kidding, I hadn't been to a party in over a year) I said that I would go. Turned out that the guy that Mel was dating at the time, was roomates with the guy that invited me to the party (ok, I kinda knew that but it was an added bonus to going to the party.)

Fast forward a couple more months and she had broken up with the guy from work, and I am a little rusty on who asked whom but I went over to her appartment to hang out, drink some beers, and watch TV, (Lame I know, but I had been out of the dating game for quite a while....actually come to think of it I never actually got into the adult dating game at all after a long relationship from high school ended.) This was right after I had decided to re-persue the Army after the idea fell though when I was 18. I felt like I was in a dead end rut at work(mostly cause I had advanced so quickly that the position that I was in some others had been in for 20 or more years) and my personal life wasn't really tied down so I up and joined the Army. It was the weekend before I left that I was on my way home from my brothers wedding in wisconsin, I had given her a call and asked her if she would like to meet up later for dinner (this is the time that I ordered a salad at a steak house and she will never let me forget that) it was a great dinner and we said our good byes and that was it, "it," whatever it was, was over before it even got started.

I was in Korea at Camp Casey, a little drunk I might add, and late night drunken phone calls back to the states were of little harm because our late nights over there were middle of the day for anyone in the continental United States, and they rarely woke anyone up at odd hours of the day. I decided to give her a call and see what she was up to, she had been at Navy OCS doing something that I couldn't make out cause the connection on the phone was crappy, not surprising. Which pretty much brings us up to date with her stories.

I have struggled for days (cause she asked me a few days ago to contribute to her blog) about what to write about, I picked the timeline before we were together because it amazes me even to this day that such a broken road can lead up to a wonderful life with such a wonderful woman. I often think about the way things would be if I had chosen certain different paths in life and now I can say that I wouldnt have done anything different and instead of focusing on things I could have done differently in the past, I can focus on things that I WANT to do with her by my side in the future!