HAVEN

I'm participating in this year's A-Z challenge, and so will be posting daily about a subject focusing on a letter of the alphabet.

A shelter from the storm...a soft, safe place to land at the end of the day...my haven is within my husband's arms.

Vic and I met in the 8th grade, when I transferred from public school to St. Ann's, the neighborhood K-8 Catholic school. There couldn't possibly have been a more difficult time to assimilate into a group of kids who had been together since kindergarten. If you don't remember, middle school is a viper pit. Yes, even a  Catholic one. It was a very, very rough year for me. I was ridiculed mercilessly by most of the kids. I was tall, straight as a rail, had a bad haircut and blushed at every insult. No wonder I became painfully shy. Vic was nice to me, although honestly, we probably barely knew that the other existed.

Then we went to high school, and things changed. In the 11th grade, I asked him out to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Do they even have those anymore?

 Wikipedia states:  "The Sadie Hawkins dance is named after the Li'l Abner comic strip character Sadie Hawkins, created by cartoonist Al Capp. In the strip, Sadie Hawkins Day fell on a given day in November (Capp never specified an exact date). The unmarried women of Dogpatch got to chase the bachelors and "marry up" with the ones they caught. The event was introduced in a daily strip which ran on November 15, 1937.

In the U.S. and Canada, this concept was popularized by establishing dance events to which the woman invited a man of her choosing, instead of demurely waiting for a man to ask her. The first known such event was held on November 9, 1938. Within a year hundreds of similar events followed suit. By 1952, the event was reportedly celebrated at 40,000 known venues. It became a woman-empowering rite at high schools and college campuses, and the tradition continues in some regional American cultures."

I remember trying to work up the nerve to ask him out. I don't know how guys throughout the ages have managed this!! It was excruciating. Our lockers were very close by and I waited before 6th period for him, hanging around totally conspicuously until he was alone. I finally blurted out the question, and he replied, "Sure." He claims I then asked, "Really?' in an amazed tone, but I believe I played it much more sophisticated than that. We'll go with my story.

His mother remembers him coming home from school, hopping up to sit suavely on the kitchen counter, and announcing that he had a date for the dance. She says he acted super-cool, so she knew he was pretty excited about going out with me.

That was our first date with each other, and the last with anyone else. 

We've been married for 32 years now, after dating for almost 6, and while every single second hasn't been perfect, we are good together. We've had some spectacularly great times, some truly awful tragedies, and with four kids, pretty much everything in between that you can think of. I can't imagine a different life, or a different husband.

As we're aging, I think I'm more aware than ever of how blessed we are. So many years ago, back in that Catholic high school when we were first dating, we would laugh and say our match was "made in heaven!" I believe that to this day. He is still my one true love, my heart, my haven.