Comments back up

As I suspected, the Comments server is back up now. Just in time for my sister to get the trivia question right. Gilligan's first name was Willy. Jonas Grumby was the Skipper's name, and how about the Professor's name? It was Roy Hinkley. By the way, the Gilligan-first-name-question is only meant for us trivia addicts; it was never mentioned in the series. I told Annette today that I didn't know what to write about anymore. She said, batting her eyes, "write about me!" It just so happens that I was singing some of my old songs today. This second verse is all her and written shortly after we met. _____________________________________________ I met a lady, just as fine as she could be Proud as a lion she roared that she was in love with me I had no choice but to heed her will I followed her around all the way until We had to stop and make a deal That she would be nice if I would be real And before too long we both began to feel That the love we had found was damned close to ideal ______________________________________________ Our meeting is the stuff of myth now, no one really knows how it happened. For me, the story starts in 1980 when I was spending the night in the hospital due to a partially collapsed lung. It was nothing serious, they just wanted to keep an eye on it overnight. But that night, as it grew late I was very lonely. I had just broken up with my girlfriend, so I couldn't call her. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall, a print that I had grown up with at church. I prayed to Jesus to be with me. Then I stood up to gaze out the window and a very positive thought overcame me. That thought was this: someday, I'll be happily married; and the girl I will marry is out there tonight. I just haven't met her yet. But she's alive and happy and probably doing something fun right now and someday she'll be my wife. Or, as the Hollies sang, "Some day my name and hers are going to be the same." A couple of years later, I was playing in a Rock Band and we practiced in the basement of St. Johns Episcopal on Arsenal. A friend of ours' Dad was the Pastor there. This friend had a girl-friend who had a close friend named Annette Pingel. One night they all came down to hear us practice. I think that was the first time we met. A couple of months later, a whole group of us were meeting up at the Ritz Theatre to see a movie. I didn't know she would be there, nor she me. We got to talking though and discovered that we were both enrolled at the Conservatory and School for the Arts (CASA) out in University City. She was studying Piano and I Classical Guitar. After the movie everyone went over to my apartment for more fun and merriment. It was that night that made up my mind to ask her out. Of course, I didn't. At my next Guitar lesson at CASA, I told my instructor, "There's this girl I want to get together with and she's a piano student here. Can you help me out? Like with a duet or something that we 'have' to work on?" He thought it was great and said that actually, it's required to work on a duet. Well...I mean, if it's required! Then by all means, a duet it will be. We started working on it every Friday night at school. Soon, we were going out afterwards. By the time the recital rolled around, we were engaged to be married. Total time "going out" together before we were married was six months. One more instance that always sticks in my mind is one day we were at her apartment to practice. We were paging through some Pop-Rock fake books and having a great time. I mentioned that we had better get down to work on the recital material and then excused myself to use the restroom. While I was in her bathroom I heard her start "paging through" a J.S. Bach book. She was paging through it as easily as she had paged through the Pop-Rock book. I smiled. I thought to myself, "I gotta keep her."