The story of us. The beginning

 

Since 1982

For single shot April on a photo a day website I’ve posted in since 2011,  Instead of choosing one item like I have several previous Aprils, I chose one relationship. This is a repost of those thirty days, three days at a time. 

It began in 1982 when we were both first year students at Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming. I had noticed him the first semester in fall of 1981 but in January of 1982 he moved from his dormitory to his sister’s apartment in my hometown 30 miles away. I was taking evening classes and he was doing rehearsals for Godspell. He advertised in the daily hotline for someone to carpool with and I answered. That first drive home from the college in my mom’s brown mercury zephyr station wagon, I was nervous but he was easy to talk to. He patted my shoulder and told me to relax when I kept apologizing for how I drove. I thought he lived with his girlfriend because when I called to set up the carpooling, his sister answered, “This is April” and 43 years later I can still hear her voice and feel my heart fall. 

I’ve always been a visual person and I’ve filled the walks and bookshelves with pictures recording the life we created together. 

Music

When Greg and I first met, he was a chemistry major and I was an art major at a two-year college in Powell, Wyoming. But I was taking creative writing classes in the evening and he was taking theater and was one of the cast members singing “all good things” in Godspell. 
Music seem to surround everything we did. Because our first conversations happened while we were carpooling, there was usually the radio playing. Because he was rehearsing in a musical. He was often in humming or singing songs from Godspell. But the very first place I saw him was when a friend had invited me to watch her rehearse in the Northwest Singers Audition pop choir group. I didn’t sing, but I had grown up with the northwest singers coming to do concerts at my elementary and junior high and high school and I already loved that group.
By that time, Greg was living with his big sister April. The first time he invited me home, we walked in the door and he put on a Cat Stevens album, called Teaser and the Fire Cat, which includes peacetrain, and morning has broken, but my favorite was “how can I tell you.”
10 months later, we were living together and he had changed his major to music and theater. He said chemistry wasn’t challenging to him, but he loved the challenge of making good music in theater and I have to admit for 40 years. He has been wonderful at adding music, theater, drama, and delight to my life.

Love me, love my brother

When I graduated from High School you might think I would be eager to get away from the town where I had been bullied. But oddly I wasn’t. Maybe because I had found school to be filled with a lot of pain and danger, I wasn’t eager to see what else was out there. So I went to college as close to home as I could, and that meant I lived at home and rode 25 miles on a Jr. college school bus each morning and came home at five PM

The first semester was a period of more growth than I expected. People smiled at me and said “hi” between classes and I kept looking shyly around to see who they were talking to, and there would be no one but me around. It took time but I gradually realized that I did not have “loser” branded on my forehead and I started looking up beyond my shoes and smiling first.
Then I needed a class only offered in the evening when the bus didn’t run. I bravely called a number listed in the school’s hot line (a daily sheet of messages printed and hung on various bulletin boards by student services) looking to carpool for evening classes. And with that call, I changed my life.
The other student was also a tall, skinny redhead, and would become my life long best friend and partner in everything. My first graceful words to him were rude, “I never met a redhead I liked” but he was funny and gentle and rowdy and confident and he passed the biggest test of all. He loved my brother Lance as soon as he met him and was soon coming with gifts to visit Lance as much as to see me. My grandma adored him, and Mom informed me that if I ever broke up with him, the rest of the family was keeping him.
I never considered breaking up with him though, he made me see myself through his eyes and for the first time ever since my first day of first grade, I loved who I am.