Some memories are like a delicious cup of coffee on a gorgeous spring morning. One of my favorites, which also solved a childhood mystery, is the day I learned that my wife, Susan, had unknowingly seen me ten years before we met on a blind date.
Shortly after our marriage, we started talking again about growing up in Bergen County, New Jersey. By an odd coincidence, even though we had never met before our blind date in New York City's Greenwich Village, we grew up in two adjacent towns.
On this particular morning I mentioned that my friend, Doug, and I used to go to a garbage dump in the town where Susan lived to look for hidden treasures and that we once found a small rowboat partially submerged in a nearby stream.
I told her how Doug and I got the boat out of the stream and onto the bank; how we dragged it because it was waterlogged to a bridge near the main road; and how because we were exhausted we decided to hide it under the bridge and return for it the next day.
I then related how Doug and I carefully camouflaged the boat with branches and how shocked and disappointed we were when we came back and found that the boat was gone.
When I finished, Susan looked stunned, and after a few seconds said, "I know what happened to your boat! My brother Carl and his friends took it. While we were playing in some tall grass near the brook, we saw two tough-looking kids using branches to cover something.
Once they left, Carl and his friends ran down to the bridge, took off the branches, saw the boat, and carried it to our house. Carl eventually put wheels on it and used it as a wagon."
"You let your brother steal my boat!" I shouted with a smile. And then started laughing in disbelief that my future wife saw me long before we met.
Susan looked confused as she tried to get her mind around what she had just learned. She finally said, "No offense dear, but it creeps me out that I saw my future husband when I was so young."
During our 45 years of marriage we have told family and friends about our blind date and the hidden rowboat episode. We have noticed an occasional incredulous look.
Nevertheless, during the bumps in our relationship, I sometimes think about what Susan says about seeing me hiding a rowboat under a bridge when she was 11 and I was 13, "Some higher power picked us for each other, because what are the odds?"
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