Ben and I probably met in the fall of 2003 during some kind of freshman icebreaker at Harding University, a small college in Arkansas, far from both our hometowns, mine in south Florida, his near Indianapolis.
We frequented the same French, religion and philosophy classes and found ourselves at the same coffee shop most days. There was just the one coffee shop in that town for a while, and we somehow existed in it separately for years of days.
We graduated, and our families shared a table at the commencement luncheon. A couple months later, I left for China, and he went to Florence.
I’d been in Wuhan a few months, and I loved it but I missed some Western food. Ben was living in a literal palace, floors above a city of bread and cheese. I wanted to at least hear about his glorious Italian lifestyle, so used Skype to talk while our families and friends in the states were sleeping. He got to hear about bus rides and market visits, the endearing ways my Chinese students managed to butcher English. I got to hear about EU politics and his long afternoon lunches at cafe patios.
A few years and a few moves later, we were both in the same country, same city even, officially together after dating long-distance for four years.
In 2016, I joined his family to visit his grandparents in Mentone, a small town known as the Egg Basket of the Midwest, in the northern part of the state. His grandfather had a remarkable memory and was excited to have in me a new recipient of his old preacher jokes. And while he talked with me, I asked him about all the places he had lived and preached. One of them, the place where Ben’s mother was born, was Flat Rock, Michigan.
I smiled and told him my mother had grown up in Flat Rock and wondered if they had crossed paths. We talked more, and I learned he had been the fill-in minister at my mother’s church when she was 5 or 6 years old. He probably went to dinner at my mother’s house, my grandmother being a constant and happy hostess. He also worked as an English teacher at the high school both of my parents would attend, with the teachers my parents would have, and Ben’s grandmother was a first grade teacher at my mother’s elementary school. So I was sitting in a dim living room in Kosciusko County with a 98-year-old man, and we were casually chatting about people whose names populated the stories of my childhood.
Ben’s grandfather passed away in the summer of 2018, shortly after his 100th birthday, and as we sorted through the lovely collection of books and notes in his home, the history of his life, we found a yearbook from his time in Flat Rock: Ben’s grandfather on one page, a few pages later his grandmother with her class, and on the last page of kindergartners, my mother.
I don’t presume to know the how or the why, but it certainly feels as though my and Ben’s life, and our coming marriage, has been about 70 years in the making.