a year ago @ Wednesday, Nov. 05, 2003

At about this exact time last year I was reading an e-mail from Psycho Jen asking me to meet her at the Pub for happy hour. My intentions were to go home and change and then meet Deb for dinner and drinks but what the hell? I left early, bought a new shirt and jeans and fought rainy traffic to the bar.

We had a few drinks and I ran off to the Mexican place to meet Debbie. Well, our dinner and drinks turned into, "You wanna go to the Pub?" Of course! Jen was still there, drunk as hell, and - oddly enough - so was Debbie's new husband.

After Leo and Jen left we moved up to the bar to talk to an attractive man sitting there. I was just drunk enough to have no inhibitions. We chatted and found that he was here on business from California. The bartender gave us five bucks to play the jukebox and I flirtatiously asked him to help us pick out songs.

We started talking about the Trolley, our other favorite bar just a few hundred feet away. "Too bad you're tired, Deb, we could go shoot some pool," I said.

"Let's go," she said and we did. Deb's my best cheerleader and knew I was already attracted to and getting along well with this dark haired stranger.

He won every game of pool we played but swore that he sucked and I distinctly remember the moment he pulled his pullover over his head and tossed it on the bench.

We closed the bar and I remember thinking, I may never see this guy again. As we were seperating to go to our cars he handed me his business card, "Call me if you want to have drinks sometime."

Deb and I got in the car, looked at one another and screamed like schoolgirls.

That was Big and that was exactly a year ago.