October 22

I write this morning of a boy and girl who met in college. The boy called the girl on a campus phone that served an entire wing of a crowded freshman dorm. Would she like to go a dance that weekend?

The girls' friends who had overheard the call (which wasn't hard to do) said the boy was nice, and so the girl said yes even though she didn't know the boy. (It was that kind of time and that kind of school.)

When the boy came to pick up the girl, she was delighted to find that he owned a car and that before the dance they would be going into town for an orangeade. So they had the drink and they went to the dance and they kissed good night in front of the dorm. (Again, it was that kind of time and that kind of school.)

Now if this was a fairy tale, the next line would be "They started talking that night and never stopped."

But this is not a fairy tale. The girl and boy fell in love, yes, but later they broke up and dated other people and broke up with those people and dated still other people. They moved from the Midwest to the east coast and back again.

They never forgot each other, though, and even before they married, even when they lived hundreds of miles apart, they never forgot the date they went to the dance and sipped the orangeade and learned each others stories. It was October 22.