Thelma and Larry

I had just graduated from high school.   My parents let me use the car to go to a drive-in movie with my high school friends.   We had so much fun that night that we wanted to do it again. My birthday was coming up in July, so we were planning to go out and celebrate my birthday.  

Well, I had heard a rumor in the church we attended, that there was a family moving to Arizona that had 10 children. I was excited about meeting some new friends.   

On June 20th, we had a Sunday school picnic, and this new family had just arrived in Tucson, so someone invited them to come. The family arrived with the 5 out of 10 children who had moved out with them.  Our youth group spent the afternoon together and later went to a swimming party at someone’s home. One of the new family members came along. This was the man that I would someday marry.

Timing Is Everything

“Life is Long:  timing is everything, even if it takes awhile”

If my husband and I had met when we were young, we wouldn’t have paid much attention to each other. I was a goody-two-shoes Dean’s List student at an Ivy League school. At the same age, G. had hair down to his shoulders and played keyboard in a local rock band that is still well known in this town to this day.
We are both pianists: I started at the age of three, trained the Lechetiszky method by a renowned Russian pianist, Professor Basil Toutorsky who had 22 pianos in a mansion on 16th Street in Washington. G. was virtually self-taught, went to the Berkley School of Music for awhile and played rock and roll, jazz and rhythm and blues. He didn’t get interested in classical music until he was in his 20’s and then shifted his focus to the complete works of a 19th century French composer named Charles Valentin Alkan.
Alkan’s piano works are so difficult that very few pianists can play them.

This is all by way of describing how different and how similar we are at the same time. We both love pianos. We courted to Alkan’s music. And we met over a piano.

Sticking It Out Through Good Times and Bad

One question we have been asked which I find to be a little complicated to answer is “How did we meet?”  Well it goes a little something like this.  We went to school together.  The End. 

No really we did go to school together.  Even though we lived near each other we went to different middle schools but we went to the same Jr. High School.  It was there we had our first encounter, one we wouldn’t even realize till after we were together and looking at old pictures she had from school that she took and found one of me.  It just so happened I was walking across the field at school one day and someone called my name I turned to look and “snap” my picture was taken; frozen in time, never to see that picture again, until approximately 21 years later.