A Valentine's Day Tale

“Knock, knock, knock”

I am jolted out of a deep, drunken sleep by a loud banging on my Smith College dorm room door.

I stumbled out of bed, and after tripping over an empty suitcase in the middle of the floor in the dark room, I yanked open the door to find my professor and undergraduate research advisor, Mary, at my door with a panicked look on her face.

“What is going on!!!???”

shitshitshitshitshitshitshit!

It was the morning of November 8, 2003 and I was due to fly to New Orleans for the Society for Neuroscience meeting with my advisor and lab mates at the crack of dawn that morning.

I spent the previous night at Packard’s, my second home in college, with an old friend who was in town visiting. I had 1 (or 5?) too many, hadn’t packed for my trip, and then overslept.

I frantically started just throwing clothes from my floor into my empty suitcase and followed her out to her car. I don’t even know what I was packing, I just prayed the collection included some clean underwear and a toothbrush. Embarrassment doesn’t begin to describe how I felt in that moment.

We raced to the airport and just barely made our flight. Our luggage wasn’t so lucky. Not that it mattered much, God only knows what kind of wardrobe was following me to my first scientific conference.

Had we not made the flight, and thereby missed our trip to the Crescent City, it would have changed the entire course of the rest of my life.

I spent the rest of that day hungover, exhausted, and dirty (since a shower was most definitely out of the question that morning). It was mostly a blur.

The second night, on the other hand, was a different story…

I was at this Society for Neuroscience, or SfN, meeting to present some of the research that I had done in Mary’s lab. Some other Smith professors were also at the meeting with their students. My classmates, Eva, Stephanie, and I were trying to formulate a plan for dinner that night. Mary had dinner plans to which we weren’t nearly fancy enough to tag along, but Adam and Richard invited us along to dinner with them. 

Later, Adam told us he was meeting some old friends from London at a bar on Bourbon St and would we care to join him.

Do you really even have to ask three 21-year old college women if they want to go out drinking on Bourbon Street?

There we were, at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, on the sketchy end of Bourbon Street, when Adam mentioned that an old friend, Andy, would be joining us. 

“Oh no, here comes trouble…” warned Eva.

Eva had met Andy, an assistant professor at Emory University, at the SfN meeting the year before. He and Adam worked in the same lab in London years before. She immediately began relaying some pretty wild stories about this English professor down south.

I was excited.

“He sounds perfect,” I thought.

A short while later, the entire courtyard at LaFitte’s erupted upon the arrival of a man wearing a sleek black suit.

After briefly engaging his old friends, he turned to me, introduced himself, then asked if I’d care to wear his jacket.

What a line!

“Oh, yes, please!” I enthusiastically replied, before it dawned on me that we were in New Orleans, it was humid as hell, and I have an excessive sweating problem. A thick, wool suit coat was going to do wonders for my hair. Later, I’d learn he started his day drinking at the pub at 6am while watching a rugby world cup game. He probably wasn’t seeing well enough to notice my hair anyway.

Flirtation was the name of the game as the night progressed.  Butterflies, thunderbolts, the whole nine yards. We couldn’t keep our eyes – or hands – off each other. The fact that he was a University professor in Atlanta while I was a college kid from Massachusetts never entered my mind. OK, maybe it did, but if so, it only made it all the more exciting.

That fateful night.

November 9, 2003.

Finally, my advisor Mary and our lab mate Penny arrived from their fancy dinner. I walked over to the entrance to meet them, and upon seeing me, Mary asked who’s over-sized, men’s suit jacket I was wearing.

“Oh, this friend of Adam’s… Andy?”

At this point, I was still on Mary’s shit list for oversleeping and nearly causing her to miss her flight, so she promptly grabbed my cheeks in her hand, pulled me close and said one word:

“Don’t.”

“What???” I innocently replied, knowing damn well what she meant.

“Just don’t,” she said and walked in to get a drink.

Cheekily laughing to myself, I strutted back over to my “forbidden fruit” to ramp up my flirtation even more. At one point, I reached my hand into The Professor’s coat (that I was still wearing, by the way -  we aren't getting x-rated quite yet) and found his passport. I remember opening the passport, revealing his passport photo, and swooning over how cute he was. Who looks cute in a passport photo? No one.  But somehow, I distinctly remember thinking that he did.

My whiskey and cokes, and his Blackened Voodoo beers, were going down a bit too easily and before too long the group decided it was time to go out dancing.

We all stumbled down Bourbon Street to The Cat’s Meow, where karaoke was wrapping up and a DJ was pumping out some quality shit. It wasn’t long before The Professor and I were taking tequila shots.

When in Rome…

The next thing I knew, The Professor and I were bumping and grinding to the music, when Mary’s arm reached around my neck from behind, pulled me away, out of the club and down the street.

I felt like a schoolgirl being punished by the old school marm. The second time that week!

Fortunately, The Professor and I anticipated something like this happening, so in our tequila-haze, had devised a plan to meet back up if we were to be separated. 

Unfortunately, the tequila-haze may have been a bit too thick and I thought the plan was for us to meet up in my hotel lobby. The Professor thought we planned to meet back at The Cat’s Meow.

After Mary frog-marched me to my hotel room door, a room I was sharing with 3 other women who were all sound asleep, I went inside and stood silently for a few moments before creeping back out for my early morning hotel lobby assignation.

I sat in the lobby for what could have been 5 minutes but felt like an eternity before realizing I was being stood up.  I’d later learn that Andy sat in The Cat’s Meow until they closed.

I finally put my tail between my legs and snuck back up to the room to get a few hours of sleep. After all, my poster was the next day. Yikes.

The next afternoon, I presented my first scientific poster at a national meeting, and the entire time was just hoping that the guy I met the night before would show up.

He didn’t.

After presenting my poster, Adam told us The Professor had invited us all to this big costume party the neuroscientists from Emory were throwing in the Garden District.

I could hardly contain my excitement, but immediately thought, “A costume party? I don’t have a costume with me…”

Or did I?

In the haste of packing while my college professor stood over me, I happened to throw in a few random pieces I could use for a costume. My former roommate and BFF Caroline had studied in Paris the year before, and upon her return to Smith that fall, brought me back a béret. That somehow made it into my suitcase. Naturally, I dressed as a “French tart,” with my béret, bright red lipstick and a very revealing top I also bought in Paris when I went to visit her. I think all of these items making their way into my suitcase for that trip was fate.

I was all ready to work my magic with The Professor (who was transformed into The Phantom of The Opera for the night) when he showed up to meet us with another woman.

I would have been crushed… but I was feeling hot and she was old and gross.  “Fuck it,” I thought. If that’s what he wanted, he was welcome to it. I’m just gonna do me.

To this day, that party still goes down as one of the best I’ve ever been to in my life. I didn’t spend much time with The Professor, but there was a full top-shelf open bar, tuxedoed staff passing hors d’oeuvres, and a live band – who could be disappointed?! (Even if the new-found love of your life was two-timing you…)

The girls and I had an epic night at the party. As it ended, everyone was out front waiting for cabs. Stephanie and I jumped into a cab with a group of fine-looking young gentlemen, and off we raced, much to the dismay of our professors. They clearly thought we were destined to a fate worse than death, so they jumped into another taxi while yelling “follow that cab!”

Adam, Mary and Penny then proceeded to pub-crawl down Bourbon Street looking for Stephanie and me. They never found us, but I think they enjoyed trying.

The next day I woke up (in my own hotel room) with about 1,000 Mardi Gras beads around my neck and my 3^rd raging hangover that week.  My first decision of the day was to go on the wagon as soon as I got back to Smith (I didn’t).  Second, I decided I needed a horrible greasy lunch to cure my hangover (it didn’t).

That afternoon, I finally realized the only cure for what was ailing me was a little hair of the dog, so the girls and I went to meet Adam for some drinks.

The Professor was there. He assured me that the woman from the night before was just an old friend and he’d love to hang out that night.

Maybe it was the extreme dehydration from the humidity and excessive boozing. Maybe it was his British Accent. In any event, I was swooning. And bad. I agreed.

After a real New Orleans night, that included an obligatory trip to Pat O’Brien’s, I was head over heels.  The truth is, I knew it the moment we met. I called my mom the next day and left her a message that said, “Hi Mom! I just wanted to let you know I met the man I’m going to marry. See you soon!”

We certainly were getting cozy that night!

We exchanged numbers. Actually, I wrote my number in lipstick on the brim of a New Orleans baseball cap I gave him the night before. Nothing but class for me. We had no idea what to expect but all we knew was we couldn’t go without meeting again.

We spoke on the phone every day after I left.

My brother tried to assure me at Thanksgiving that The Professor was married with a family in Atlanta. My mom was finally convinced this wasn’t the case when he called me on Thanksgiving Day.

“He wouldn’t be able to call her if he had a wife and kids!” she told Ron.

Ron tried to convince us he was just hiding in the bathroom with his cell phone.

A few weeks later, The Professor had a trip to New York City planned. I took a Peter Pan bus for 5 hours in a snowstorm to go down and meet him there for a single night.

I would visit Atlanta whenever I had a break from school. The Professor would visit Northampton whenever he could. In fact, he even visited Smith as a guest seminar speaker the following spring.  Adam acquired a few grey hairs during that trip.

That spring I was also accepted into Emory University’s PhD program in neuroscience. That summer I moved in with The Professor in Atlanta and started school shortly after.

Four years later we were married. Four years after that I finished my PhD. We had our first child last year.

December 24, 2006

The night we got engaged.

October 26, 2007

Our wedding.

In this day and age with internet dating and everything from booty calls to breakups happening via text message, I think people can be bitter about the idea of love at first sight. Or maybe people have always been bitter about the idea of love at first sight. And the truth is, internet dating offers a far more realistic expectation of meeting a quality man or woman who shares similar interests (other than tequila body shots). 

Maybe love at first sight is a ludicrous expectation. And of course the way I feel about The Professor, my darling Andy Jenkins, today is deeper, richer and fuller than it was in that darkened bar on that humid night in New Orleans… but it was love at first sight. I knew as soon as we met he was something special. And so did he. The idea that a professor who lived 1,000 miles away from my college dorm could ever by my “boyfriend” was more than laughable. But when you know, you just know. It certainly could have ended badly, but I have always been one to wear my heart on my sleeve. Sure, I was young and trusting, maybe even foolish, but thank God I was because after over 10 years together I know no one could have made me so happy. He is my best friend and favorite person. I love every day with him.  He flew to Australia today for a 10 day work trip and I literally cried when I dropped him off at the airport! I shed tears. Many of them. I have been with this man over 10 years and I still can’t stomach the idea of being separated. We are so madly in love with each other, now more than ever.

And I still have yet to find his secret wife and kids.