Turning Twenty-One...

Not me turning 21, obviously: I've been there and done that a good 13 years ago.

Nope -- but today is 21 years since the day that has done more to change my life more than any other since I first showed up on this planet...

June 26, 1987 -- Durham, North Carolina -- Duke University -- East Campus.
It's the end of the first week of summer camp at TIP (Talent Identification Program: 3-week academic summer camp, a.k.a. "nerd camp" in fond memory). After a week of immersion in Japanese--practicing my hiragana and katakana, learning my numbers and moving from wakarimasen to (at least skoshi) wakarimas'--I'm ready to relax and check out the afternoon/evening activity I've seen advertised on posters around the dorm: a James Bond Film Festival...

I head on over to the lounge of a neighboring dorm, Giles -- it's early, the films haven't started yet -- and nab a space on a couch. Two other TIPsters--two boys--sit on another couch across from me. We strike up a conversation, talk about comic books: we don't read the same ones (since I came to comics via Japanimation/anime [specifically Robotech--as the name Miriya may reveal to those who know!--and its adaptation by Comico] rather than on the superhero superhighway), but I invite them to come by and borrow my issues of Elementals if they like.

One of the boys turns out to be a TIPster I'd seen at Duke's Marine Lab the previous summer (though it takes me a little while to remember why he looked familiar!). And the other one?

Reader, I married him.

Not right away, of course--we were 13 and 14!--but from that day on we became an important part of each other's lives...and before long, the most important. (M. was a good deal ahead of me in this department: I may often have gotten credit for being precocious in other subjects, but it took me a while longer than it did for him to come to this particular realization.)

So today our relationship reaches the legal drinking age for the U.S. of A.
I'll gladly raise a toast to that milestone.
L'chaim!