How many people have three calendar days in a row that are significant in the story of their life?
I do, even though they happened in 1949, 1990 and 1969. The first two both happened in Southern California — my birth on Dec. 11, 1949, and the auto accident that was the closest I ever came to dying on Dec. 12, 1990.
I wrote about that yesterday, and when I think of all the joys of family that have come in the 30 years since, it’s as if that day was the end of one life and the beginning of another.
The third day came on the other side of the country, as close to halfway between the two as possible. It was Dec. 13, 1969, in Washington, D.C., when I met the first girl I thought I would marry.
Most people who know me are aware I was one of the founding brothers of the Virginia Mu chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon when I started at George Mason in 1978.
It’s one of the real prides of my life.
But nine years earlier, during a misbegotten year and a half at George Washington University, I actually pledged a different fraternity.
You want irony? Delta Tau Delta was the jock fraternity, and they got interested in me because of my athletic ability. There were only a couple of sports at which I was above average, but at 19 (nearly 20) I was a pretty good quarterback in pickup football games and a really good outside shooter on the basketball court.
Anyway, a couple of the DTD brothers saw me playing football and invited me to a party. Before I knew it, I was pledging.
It was a strange fall, the first of the Richard Nixon years. There were massive antiwar demonstrations in Washington in both October and November, and I was torn between current events, pledging and classes. As was too often true for me in those days, classes brought up the rear.
I started dating a girl I liked in October. We weren’t serious or exclusive, but we had some fun dates and were making slow progress. She was a descendant of America’s first First Lady, Martha Custis, and as November turned to December, I figured I would be taking her to the fraternity’s Christmas party on Dec. 13th.
But a week before the party, she told me she was going to be out of town with her family, and all of a sudden, I had no date. My big brother in the fraternity had been wanting to set me up with his girlfriend’s roommate, but she already had a date for this occasion with one of my pledge brothers.
Jim, my big brother, suggested that I could come to the party with a different date and then at some point during the evening, I would abandon her and his girlfriend’s roommate Shelley would abandon her date and we could end up together.
Not my proudest night.
In fact, way down the list.
For one thing, the reason my date was still dateless was that she had what we now refer to as a cleft palate. Or as my less sensitive friends called it, a harelip.
Anyway, it was around 11:30 when we went through with it, upsetting our dates and angering my fraternity brothers. I received a strong warning that “snaking” my pledge brother’s date was totally unacceptable. All I can say was that it made it a lot easier for them to abandon me when I didn’t make grades.
Shelley and I survived the inauspicious start and were inseparable for the next six months. I was 20 and she was 18 and it was the first real relationship for both of us. Nearly 50 years later, I still get a starry-eyed feeling when I hear a song that was popular at the time that we made “our” song.
It was “Walkin in the Rain” by Jay and the Americans, followed in the spring by “My Baby Loves Lovin'” by White Plains.
We broke up in September 1970 and it was 30 years later before I ran into her at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. We spoke for a minute, hugged and that was it. She went back to her role as a Connecticut delegate and I went off to look for that day’s column.
She’s 69 now and a state judge back in Connecticut.
I’m 71 and retired with the love of my life in Georgia.
But Dec. 13 is still a memorable day to me.
Just like Dec. 12.
And Dec. 11.