That Guy

Chance and Carissa came home this weekend! It was the first time we’d seen them since the wedding and it was good to just share space with them. Chance and I finished tiling the walk-in shower. His first tile job is in the books and I am impressed with how quickly he picks up on, well, everything! It’s always great to have Chance’s help. He’s eager to learn and it helps keep me motivated, something that is getting harder to come by in the latter stage of the build. We are inching ever closer to our self imposed deadline of November 13th and it seems hopeful that we’ll make it. So much so that Becky and I were talking about where furniture would go in each room, as we were preparing the concrete floor for staining tomorrow evening.

While deciding what to keep and what to put in storage until the big house gets finished next summer I made the statement “let’s pretend we’re just starting out and this is our first apartment together.” Becky and I found each other later in life and didn’t share the experience of “starting out” together. Which is a good thing, because I’m quite certain she wouldn’t have had anything to do with me had our paths crossed in our twenties.

Then I remembered something Carissa said Saturday night while we were playing cards (yes, I stopped working early enough to have supper and play cards with the family). She told a story of the first time she got to introduce Chance as her husband. They were out to dinner and ran into someone she knew from the bank but that customer didn’t know Chance. Here’s what struck me about that story.

That snapshot in time is the definition of who Chance is, at least until something else happens that changes it. Imagine Chance running into that guy in a couple weeks and they recognize each other. I'm certain as they shake hands that guy will say something like “yeah, I remember you. You’re Carissa’s husband.”

It’s funny, or scary, if you think about it. How quickly we can make judgements or assumptions about people with little or no background information and then they’re locked in as “ that guy”.

If you polled people who have known me throughout my life and asked them to describe me in one word, the adjectives chosen by people from my twenties would be very different (hopefully) from those who have been introduced to me through this blog. And the truth is, whoever they think I am, they’d all be correct. I have been a lot of different people on my way to being me. Some out of necessity, some out of ignorance, some out of convenience but all of them by choice. Most of those earlier versions are gone but we still talk to each other on occasion. I sometimes wonder what that guy was thinking and I’m sure I’m unrecognizable to my younger self. Someday I’ll look back and think about the night Becky

and I spent arranging imaginary furniture in our “first apartment” together and I’ll think, “How did that version of me get so lucky?”