Nine Years. Time Does In Fact Fly.

Reprinted from about a year ago at this time

Wedding Day 2015 at Gray’s Lake. L to R, Jade Duncan, Caitlin Donovan, me, Cybil, Delaney Donovan, Jackson Olson, Jonah Olson

Back in 2015 my future wife decided to try her luck on Match.com and learned quickly that tall good-looking redheads are in great demand. She was inundated with winks and greetings and propositions but responded to only one. Guy by the name of Donovan.

There is much to be said for correct spelling and complete sentences. We’ve been together ever since.

This was my second and obviously last foray into Match.com. I’d sworn off it a few years earlier after coming to the conclusion that no matter how low you set your expectations, it’s still possible to be disappointed. But during a family gathering at my Uncle Lum’s house on New Year’s Eve 2014 I looked around at a lot of happy couples and thought it couldn’t hurt to take another shot online.

I was two weeks in when this tall good-looking redhead popped up in my list of potential matches. I added her to my Favorites category. She sent some sort of acknowledgement that she appreciated being put in my Favorites. I figured that was a good sign, so I immediately wrote her a note with correct spelling and complete sentences. We spent the entire next day sending messages through Match and then texting back and forth. She said she liked Jakob Dylan better than Bob and that she wasn’t sure Idaho existed because she’d never met anyone from there. We riffed on alien abduction.  

It was Friday night and I had taken my laptop to the café at Barnes & Noble to work on what would become Trombone Answers. The texting continued and she suggested we might as well meet. I agreed. When? Tonight would be fine. I packed up the laptop and ran home for a quick housecleaning, which didn’t take as long as you might think because I was trying to sell the house and find something smaller anyway.

Cybil had been bowling at a family birthday party, and when she showed up at my house she hadn’t even bothered to put her regular shoes back on. I peered out the door as she came up the sidewalk and thought holy cow, someone from Match who actually looked better than her profile picture. And in sock feet to boot.

I went her one better—I was barefoot.

We hit it off and I was impressed immediately with her love of life, her wit, her dazzling smile, her intelligence, her confidence, her fierce support of society’s underdogs. She liked me too but I don’t think it had anything to do with my feet. I think she was mostly impressed by the card trick I did for her, the one Andy Ellinghausen taught me during a lunch break during the detasseling summer of 1984.

It’s a pretty amazing trick. But maybe she thought I was cute and funny too. Point is, we’ve been married eight nine years today and while we’ve been through some twists and turns I remain as glad as ever I put her on my Favorites list.

She’s the only one on the list.