I accidentally met a wonderful woman, one Anne Elizabeth Anderson. As the wonderful, loving, doting husband the rumors make me out to be, I’m supposed to remember all the appropriate dates of all the major moments in our life that defined our relationship. Unfortunately, I don’t.
Our story, sadly, begins quite some time after most of peoples’ stories here so far. I was wasting time at work on Yahoo! Games, in the middle of the night. I picked a game I’d never played before and made sure to pick a game room with the least number of people in it. While playing I was watching the chat room text scroll by; the typical mix of 13 year olds fascinated with recently discovered appendages, a couple of bored housewives teaching the 13 year olds new phrases related to aforementioned appendages and the randomly occurring new player who can never seem to find the time to read the 3 sentence instructions but can always find time to write paragraphs on your supposed familial shortcomings for not dropping everything and teaching them all the tricks within 5 seconds of their request for help. In drops guru_advisor.
It was a reasonably short sentence she dropped in the chat room, nothing of consequence, not even memorable today for its content. Its clarity, in a stream of training wheel clad invectives was not unlike how many of you describe her at the parties in college; Bold, strutting, perhaps even a wee bit domineering, “Pay attention to me now!” So I did.
The conversation revolved to her tumor and recent surgery and upcoming therapy. I had no idea guru_advisor was a she, only that it was an intelligent voice in the middle of the night to make the last 8 hours of the night pass by that much more quickly. She mentioned a brain tumor, that was unusual and probably a lie. She named it. I looked it up, researched it over the course of an hour or so and then grilled her on it. Oops, it was real. She got tired and went to bed.
Next night, hoping, I went back to the same game room and she showed up. We talked some more:
“What is it like?”
“Scary”
“How do you feel?”
“I recovered from brain surgery faster than I was supposed to. I’m feeling great but I’m scared of the MRI’s, I don’t like that mask. Rad therapy is scary, they tell me it’s going to do a lot of bad things to me but they don’t know who they’re dealing with.”
On it went. For hours. Then a week. I couldn’t figure out why I cared but I wanted to talk to her. By this time I learned that guru_advisor was a she. That scared me. I had a rule in my life; if the person had breasts and I wasn’t dealing with that person in a work capacity then that person stayed out of my life. Period. She asked if we could talk by phone. I said no. She asked again. I said maybe. We talked some more online. She gave me her number, said she was tired and if I wanted to talk more to call. Check.
One month and a six hundred some odd dollar phone bill later I realized that there was something about this woman that I was spending all my free time (and some of my work time) with and I couldn’t get her out of my mind no matter how hard I tried. She wanted to meet. She wanted to say certain three word phrases that were verboten in my vocabulary at that time. I refused. I adamantly stood my ground. It all crashed in one night when we only talked for an hour and she was so tired and weak sounding after one of her bouts of radiation therapy. I had to make the choice about what the hell was happening to me, to her, to *gulp* us.
I made a list, thinking I could do this logically and stand my ground: She had a brain tumor and might not live, she was narcoleptic, she had some really strange beliefs about life, she was this, she did things like that, the whole thing was insane, ludicrous, preposterous, she had no idea what a bridge troll I was and I didn’t want to waste time and emotion on someone that was going to take one look at me, blush and say, “Oops, sorry, I thought you were someone else,” then walk away. After carefully examining all of these facts and failing to come up with a single sentence on the positive side I agreed to meet her the same day or at least week her radiation therapy was completed. Check and mate.
I could, and maybe someday should, go into detail about the rest. You, however, know the rest because you’ve been there. It a was fairly typically boy meets girl, boy tries to run away from girl, girl clubs boy over head and drags back to cave kind of story. It had some differences, we lived 1009.5 miles away from each other (according to www.mapquest.com). A simple movie date was a two week planning affair that cost roughly twice as much as a normal movie due to airfare (we brought our own popcorn and drinks in her cavernous purse if we had to buy a ticket inside of the two week period to keep the costs reasonable). It was a relationship and it was wonderful because it was the right relationship.
She drilled me on her family at my insistence so I would know everyone. Endless tales of her childhood, a large family, each of the children she baby sat so often that she often referred to them as her babies. As a single child of a single parent it was like listening to a high fantasy story. How so many people could live under one roof, with so many differences and still work together still mystifies me even now as I’m part of it. To get to her level of detail on each brother and sister and her anger at one because of something they did and her joyous celebration the next second as they did something wonderful was incredible to behold. Her discussions of and obvious love for her parents made me wonder if I didn’t need to pay more attention to my mother.
She talked of her college life constantly. I often felt like I could walk into a room of her college friends, sit down and talk with them as if I had been to college with them as well. She loved her time there and loved the people even more. Having met three of those people, I know why.
She told me with her eyes large and head held high of her time working as an academic advisor. She was so proud of her kids that she advised and it tore her up that she had to leave. She earned her online chat name there, guru_advisor and she used it with great pride.
She told of her time in Mississippi with her Grandmother and working as an artist there. She loved it, loved the coast but was ready for a change. Her tumor saw to that and then she was in Texas and then with me on and off in Arizona.
We both knew it was going to happen. It was a headache here, not enough energy to do anything for a couple days at a time there. She had a goal. She was going to beat this tumor if it killed her. There was a party (and I think we all know how Anne loved parties). One of my dearest friends and his girlfriend had gone and gotten knocked up. Anne loved Barbara and Jason both and she was not going to let the tumor interfere with her life. So she ignored it. We ignored it. She spent every waking hour on a present. A handmade blanket for the child. She spent time the tumor didn’t want her to have on that blanket. She dressed up. She put on her make up. She put on her heels (and I think we all know about her love of heels and parties). She went to that party and she gave that blanket to Barbara. She had two frontal lobe seizures during the party. We ignored them because our friends were getting married and she told me we were going to be there. My friends had a wonderful wedding and we were both there for it, dressed to the nines.
A couple days after the wedding her headache hadn’t gone away so I called up work and said I wouldn’t be back in, ever, bought two one way plane tickets to Dallas and there we were. I think at this point most of you know the rest, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Perhaps if people want to know more, or I need to say more of it, I’ll write that up separately. For the most part, in a nutshell, that’s my Anne.
Bruce C. Campbell
blackhat00@yahoo.com
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