Brian used to LOVE purple. That was his favorite color when I first met him. I’m not sure exactly when he lost his obsession with it (He had a purple backpack throughout college and I believe we still have it. Somewhere). When I see purple, I think of him and remember the day we met in person. 1994. It was the end of spring semester and just before the beginning of summer semester and we had been talking online for about 3 months. I drove up to Huntsville, AL from Milledgeville, GA. We had decided to meet in a public place and, appropriately enough, we chose the Toys R Us parking lot. At that time, it was on University Blvd. I’m not sure if it’s still there or not. I was in a red Mazda pick up. He was in a brown Toyota corolla (Baby). He had a scruffy beard and long curly hair. I don’t remember my hair, but I think I was in my short hair phase at that point. I was parked, he drove up, we saw each other, he pointed at me and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “Is it you?†I did the same and we smiled. We probably got out of our respective cars, hugged, and talked for a bit before heading to the mall to meet up with some of his friends. Driving separately, of course.
Pause for safety talk: In 1994, the internet was still fairly new. No Windows. No AOL. Just a bunch of geeks and very few freaks of the scary variety. Still, since there were some, it was best to meet in public, travel separately, and hang out in a group. So that’s what we did.
Back to reminiscing: From there, we spent the day hanging out with his friends. With the way we hung on each other, you would have thought we had been together for months. In a way, we had been.
I don’t recall at what point we went to his parents, but it was a group of us who went. They fed us and I remember sitting around the picnic table – a handful of college kids and his parents – carrying on a conversation in puns. Yet more confirmation he was a keeper: a witty sense of humor. Later, it came up that I played piano at my church and, since we were both Episcopalian, his mom (also a musician) had a hymnal. I played piano, she played guitar and I have no idea how long we played.
It was near the end of his semester and I helped them move him out of the dorm. On a more awkward note, we also helped move his ex-girlfriend move out of her dorm. That’s part of reason I missed my deadline on when I’d planned on heading home to South Georgia. The other part was that, frankly, I wasn’t very good at planning how long things would take or how long it would really take for me to drive from Huntsville, AL to Albany, GA (A good 6-8 hours, depending on how frequently you stop. And I stop a lot.). Okay, and maybe yet another part was that I really didn’t want to leave.