This is the 5th grade, the year after Randy and I met. (Apparently neither of our mothers saved our class photo from 4th grade.) I am the sleepy looking girl holding the sign in the top photo and Randy is the boy on the top left of the bottom photo - the one with the huge circles under his eyes.

We met in the 4th grade, though you couldn’t prove it by me - I was the new kid in school and as best I can remember, I never noticed Randy. For him it was love at first sight, though, and he thought of me as his girlfriend. Unfortunately, he was so shy that he could never bring himself to speak to me. On valentine’s day he put an anonymous valentine in my envelope with all the others - I’m not sure if I was supposed to guess that it was from him, or what. The next year - still without having spoken to me - Randy saved his allowance and went with a friend to a jewelry store to put a ring on lay-away for me. He did buy the ring, but was too shy to give it to me. He kept it for many years, though - long after he had married someone else and had children of his own.

Still later, Randy and his friend Sam (tall guy in the center of the top photo) went exploring in what we called “the ditch.” It was actually a concrete drainage pipe underground nearly tall enough for a 10-year-old to stand up in. He and Sam brought matches and cigars (!) and other things explorers might need and talked about girls. Randy lit his cigar and used the ash to write his initials and mine in a heart. Of course I didn’t find out about this for decades.

We went on this way through junior high and high school, still never speaking because we never shared a class after 4th grade. I was on the newspaper staff, he took drafting and art classes. He dated a girl a year behind us and eventually married her. We graduated and I moved away to go to college.

Fast forward 20 years. Somewhere along the way a high school friend of mine ran into Sam - yes, the one from the ditch. He told my friend that Randy had had a crush on me all those years ago, which seemed very odd to me. Randy GAINES? He never said a word to me. And then, on a lark, I went back to California for our 20th high school reunion. After dinner I walked up to Randy and said, “I hear you had a crush on me.” And he said, “Who are you?” Which was rude, right? I recognized HIM, and I wasn’t the one with the crush.

Once I showed him my name tag to verify my identity we spent the rest of the evening just talking. People would come up to talk to him and he would ignore them and we just kept talking. At the end of the evening he hugged me and it was like being struck by lightning.

So it was love at first sight for me too. It just took me a little longer to see him.