The best year of my life.
Last year I took a course called Survey of Worldviews. Each week we wrote three short opinion papers on topics such as the meaning of life or the existence of God. I was having at least one existential crisis a week! I would get together often with my friend Mike to talk about all of these crazy topics. I had the class with my friends Lulu and Mike’s roommate David. Often times David and I would write notes or make jokes during class. Sometimes Brianna would visit and take pictures while Lulu took notes, the professor spoke, and Dave and I made jokes.
David is an avid reader, couchsurfer, unicycler, and dumpster diver who can play just about any musical instrument. He’s one of the coolest, craziest guys I know. Once last summer he called me & told me he and some of our friends were going on a road trip and invited me along last-minute. (I went, of course!) We met a year earlier when I went with a few friends to check out my school’s open swim. I also met my good friends Mike Killam, Rachel, Anna, and Daniel that night too. It was a heated game of water basketball; I’m terrible at sports but I’m also terribly competitive. I’m almost positive we unofficially met when I tried to push him underwater to get the ball from him.
I took him home one day last fall semester to hang out at my parents’ house. Within hours he knew not only all of the cool hang out spots and attractions in my area, but he also knew my kitchen better than I did! We ran to the store and got all of the fixings for pizza. He taught me how to bake one from scratch and a slew of other delicious meals (like corndogs, french toast, cookies, and deep-fried oreos!).
I was excited to visit his hometown, especially because many of my other friends including Lulu had already and told me of all of the crazy adventures that ensued during their visits. Finally, after weeks of scheduling, rescheduling, checking and rain-checking, I put “Visit Woodstock, IL” on my bucket list. David is a really driven person and the day he saw my bucket list he was inspired to make his own (which he did immediately. David has this habit of doing what he says he’s going to do, right away. I’ve had this list of 300 things for ten years and hadn’t had much progress. He looked through it and began helping me do ones that took little time or effort. Without him, I don’t know if any of my far off wishes would be actualized by now.) I knew if I added his hometown to my list he couldn’t resist making my visit a priority. Well, we finally found a time when neither of us had any plans or exams or homework—Christmas break! We embarked on our trip to David’s hometown outside of Chicago an hour after our Philosophy final.
David and I have these really compatible personalities where we can find adventure in anything. En route, passing through Kalamazoo, David stopped at this little donut shop on Sprinkle Road to buy us donuts bigger than our faces!
While driving home listening to all of our favorite music and singing along, David asked what some more tasks on my list were. I told him I’d always wanted to go to a zoo, visit all 50 states, sleep under the stars, one day be introduced as “my fiance, Valerie”, sing a song over the Walmart speakers, learn at least one song on piano, and drink horchata in December. David pulled over at the nearest Mexican restaurant and I had my first taste of horchata and David’s initiative.
David’s hometown also happens to be where they shot the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. I had looked forward to visiting the pothole that was a “doosey” for months!
The rest of the weekend was spent with his friends and family, on wild ventures to Wisconsin, Walmart, and the Lincoln Park Zoo, and getting to know each other better. We hadn’t spent this much time together before and were loving every minute of it. As the week went on I had this growing feeling inside me that I couldn’t return to school in January and go back to seeing and talking to David every once in awhile. We went ice skating on Sunday, clasping hands as friends as we climbed from the frozen sand onto the icy lake, and left the lake with fingers intertwined as something so much more. (David tells the story better than I ever could on his old blog.)
Falling in love wasn’t on my bucket list, or our plans for the holiday break together, but it happened and I couldn’t be more happy about it.
We spent the first week at his parents’, the second at mine, and the third week of break in Kansas City, Missouri couchsurfing with a bunch of friends. We walked to Kansas one day after lunch just so I could say I’d been to one more state and so we could say we weren’t in Kansas anymore. We also spent New Years here where I got to cross off another task, seeing a ball drop in a downtown area. On the way back to the mitten state we stopped at St. Louis’ City Museum for a night I’ll never forget. Our friend Rob paints a good picture of the unbelievable night on his blog.
Over the past 12 months David and I have grown so much, in our love for each other and in hundreds of other ways. I began working at a kindergarten where I learned about “100 day” where you celebrate 100 days of school by doing a bunch of activities involving the number. On David and I’s 100th anniversary we decided to do the same. We did 100 jumping jacks, took 100 steps to see where we’d end up, had 100 seconds of unbroken eye contact, and many more silly activities I don’t remember but have written down somewhere. One of my favorite activities was when we took 100 heart stickers and placed them all over the third floor of the library, one of our favorite hang out spots.
This semester I noticed that the librarians were all wearing the stickers on their name-tags. I asked one about it and they told me that part of their training this year was to find at least one sticker while working on the dewey decimals on the top floor. I was floored, and couldn’t contain my surprise or laughter.
For my birthday which is on Valentine’s Day, David completed a bunch more things off of my list with me. Because I had classes all day until the evening, David found me between each of my classes to give me either a birthday present, a valentine, another bouquet of flowers, or another love note/letter. He also took me on a fancy date in fancy clothes in a fancy car he borrowed. The fanciest, most romantic, most memorable date day of my life.
We didn’t make any plans for Spring Break, though spontaneity quickly found us in Chattanooga Tennessee (and a few hours hiking in Georgia) visiting the places and people he worked with the summer before and exploring the beautiful city. A number of bucket list tasks were also checked off here, such as sleeping under the stars and throwing a paper airplane off of a building!
Summer break on the other hand, was definitely planned. David and I spent this summer on a bicycle built for two riding from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean in the biggest adventure of either of our lives. Together we rode from one beach, up and down mountains, through deserts, through our hometowns, visited Mt. Rushmore and Niagara Falls and Devil’s Tower and the world’s largest pheasant statue, then all the way to a beach on the other side of the continent. We slept in hammocks, on campgrounds, playgrounds, the erie canal, the side of the highway, in churches, and couchsurfed. We had state/province maps and a compass and each other. We learned how to survive and how to really work together and still didn’t get sick of each other! I still haven’t been to all 50 states, but because of all of our antics this year, I’ve been to half so far.
A week after our bike trip, Dave left the country to do a semester abroad in Antigua, Guatemala and I went back to living on campus. We went from three months of being together every second to three months of being two countries apart skyping at least once a week. Both of these 100 day intervals taught us the importance of spending time together and apart.
David returned last week, three days before our 365th anniversary. (We both share similar life philosophies of living each day to the fullest and appreciating the small stuff so we’ve counted days, not months.) We spent the last week getting acquainted with the idea of physically seeing each other, holding hands, and simple things like cooking together. On our actual anniversary we went to an adorable ice cream shop before dinner called The Yum Yum Tree where they have a toy train circling the walls and tooting its horn. I’d always wanted to go on a date there and even though it wasn’t on my list, Dave was excited to go!
We split a banana split with toppings so bizzare that our waitress told us we were the first to order one like it and could have it named after us.
I can say with absolute confidence that this has been the best year of my entire life and I am so fortunate and blessed to have spent it learning and growing with the coolest, craziest, unicycling, cross-country bicycling, Spanish speaking man I know.
“The ninety and nine are with dreams, content
But the hope of the world made new—
Is the hundreth man who is grimly bent
On making those dreams come true.”
David,
You are my one in one hundred, one in a million,
one of the two required to ride a tandem bike,
the one I’m excited to spend 366 more days with,
and the one I love.
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