This is the story of best friends and our fateful meeting.   Christine and I are so close that we can pretty well complete one another’s sentences.  I’d like to think it’s simply that great minds think alike (well, maybe “great minds” isn’t exactly the right term.  Probably more like “warped minds”).  Many people ask us if we are childhood friends.  Ah, no, no, no.  Certainly the meeting of these two personalities was bound to be anything but mundane!

I’m telling this story so that I don’t sound like a complete and total bitch!  Because truly, I wasn’t.  It was, however, my wedding day so… no pressure there or anything.  Seriously though, I was marrying a man that I had been living with for six years.  There were NO surprises there.  We kept the wedding small and simple.  There were some family issues, as there often are, because of choosing not to have children at the reception and other things like my sister disowning me and not coming to the wedding (it only took nine years for her to get over it – that’s a story for another day).  But the one thing that my future husband and I kept in the front of our minds was that the most important thing that day was that we were getting married (and everyone else be damned)!  And that attitude held up throughout the six months of planning.

This moment needs a little setting of the stage.  That evening in August was beautiful.  The venue was the local country club on an outdoor patio located on the golf course at sunset.  I was waiting the start time in the ladies “lounge” (read nice locker room) listening to the violinist playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  Enter my future mother-in-law (MIL).  You know the tiny lady that was the medium in the old movie Poltergeist (her real name was Zelda May Rubinstein)?  Well, that’s how I would describe my MIL… a tiny package with a powerhouse personality.

Okay.  So I’m in the lounge with my mother (a super sweetheart) and my sister who is my matron of honor.  My future MIL comes in all up in a huff and says, “You forgot to get me flowers!”

I responded, “No, I surely did not.  There are flowers out there for you somewhere, but obviously, I can’t go out wondering around to look for them!”

My sister, being the best matron of honor any woman could ever want, picked up the torch and took my MIL out and hunted down (and found) that damn corsage of hers.

Here’s the key moment people.  Just after this happened, a beautiful young woman, whom I did not know, came into the locker room in order to use the restroom.  She came into the room and stopped to pay me a compliment.  She said, “You look beautiful.”

I responded, “Who the hell are you and what are you doing at my wedding?”  Yeah, no shit.   Not sure were that came from but when you invite 75 people to your wedding, you really know everyone.  Well, I didn’t think about my husband’s one friend whose girlfriend I heard of, but never met.    Christine promptly explained that she was a plus one to my husband’s friend (we’ll call him Mark).

Christine went back to her seat and told her boyfriend that she had met the bride and… she didn’t think she was welcome.  Fortunately she stayed the evening, however, she stayed clear of me.

A few weeks later, we got together for dinner at her home.   We needed some things at the grocery store so we rode together.  To my shock, she swore like a sailor (something I don’t do).  Through the course of the next year we became the very best of friends.  She knows that I will always have her back and I know that she will always have mine.

We enjoy sharing our daily happenings as we move about this crazy world.  A day wouldn’t be complete without her.

And this is the beginning of this story of… Shit you can’t make up!