He was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met him.  I picked him out, I shook him up and turned him around; turned him into someone new.  But I digress.

Seriously, we met while working together, not in a bar (I was under age), but at a telemarket fundraising company.  And for a while we dated, if you want to call it that.  Then it sort of came out that Todd had just moved out of a place he shared with his former high school skank... uh, I mean, sweetheart.  She wasn't quite over it and made it clear by stalking him.  She drove a VW beetle and we would listen to her noisy engine circling the block.  Good thing she didn't know what my car looked like.  Now, at this point, it would have made sense to avoid this baggage and make a clean break.  Instead, we got serious.  Go figure.  I love a challenge.

It was a blissful time.  Wait, that's not us, I was thinking of someone else.  He said "I love you" first and I sort of left him hanging for couple of weeks.  And I swear it has nothing to do with how he met my parents.  Okay, okay, I'll tell you.  It was the Christmas shopping season of '89 and we went out to some humungous mall in Orange County.  Traffic was a nightmare with some road contstruction and detours; I was driving and got lost looking for the freeway onramp.  So I ran this stop sign, directly into a Mercedes turning left in front of me.  The front end of my car mangled, my parents had to pick us up and drive Todd home.  Awkward doesn't quite describe the situation, not that Todd really noticed.

See, as far as he could tell, I was a college student who happened to live at home with her parents.  Otherwise, I appeared to have my independence.  Forget that my parents are Filipino immigrants who were a little on the strict side.  And Todd had no idea we were still grieving the loss of my sister who died in a car accident just a year and a half earlier.  I couldn't help thinking, this relationship is so doomed.

Well, okay, we weren't quite doomed.  But it was a turning point anyway.  I had to tell my parents I wouldn't see him anymore and mean it.  Turns out Todd was a little more persistent than expected.  He got to know them and their expectations, including the whole ban on public (and for that matter, private) displays of affection.  Basically, he had to negotiate the details, for instance, how close to sit next to each other, whether to hold my hand, etc.  My Todd, what a trooper.

It wasn't the last cloud of doom we would ever see, but since then we've been the cute couple you've all come to know and love.  He proposed about three years later and in January, 1994, we married.