The middle of the beginning

Well, I asked Jeff and he said our anniversary is on the 10th of August. Good to know. Now, to continue our story...

Two years later I graduated from middle school and was getting ready to attend my first year at Las Vegas High School. I decided to continue my choir nerdyness and try out for the two top choirs at Vegas--Spectrum and Madrigals. Now, when you try out for these choirs, you need to be prepared to suffer through a week long torment of workshops, learning songs, practicing dances, practicing sight reading, etc. Although thinking about it now makes me want to throw up, at that time I loved it. I was so excited to be in high school, and to be in choir.

As luck would have it, I am a horrible, horrible dancer. I think I always knew this, but tried out for Spectrum anyway. Well, the judges confirmed it and I didn't make the show choir. I did, however, make Madrigals which was a pretty substantial accomplishment and something to be proud of. I think that I was the only freshman girl to make it into that choir. But, I wasn't proud of it. My dream had been to be in Spectrum, and now my life was going to be completely ruined.

Sometimes in life you just have to suck it up and make the best of it, so that is what I did. My last period of the day was Madrigals, and I actually had a really fun time in that class. One of my really good freinds, Kelli, was in it, and I also knew a lot of the other people from church and from previous choir classes. It was fun to learn new things and to hang out with my friends when we weren't practicing our songs.

There was one guy in that class, though, who I didn't know at all. He was diagonally across from me in the big horshoe that we always sat in. I thought that he was extremely good looking, but I could tell that he was a LOT older than me, which meant that he would have no interest in meeting me or being my friend. So for the first month we never talked to each other, although I would always steal glances across the room to look at him.

Well, turns out that in a small choir class you get to know everyone, whether you like it or not. One day we all got a new seating arrangement, and I was lucky enough to sit right next to the old, cute guy who I had a crush on. I was assigned a seat on the very end of the horshoe, and he sat next to me. So as time went on, I learned that his name was Jeff and that he was a senior. Yep, he was a lot older than me! But we actually kind of became friends and I learned that he was really funny, very sarcastic, always wore Pumas, and that he was pretty cool.

As Christmas time rolled around Jeff and I got to know each other a lot better, because of all the gigs we did as a choir--singing carols at old folks homes, singing for rich corporate Christmas parties, Christmas festivals, etc. Thanks to Seth Brunner and the Brunner mobile, we all rode together to the gigs and had some really fun times! We also invited Jeff to start having lunch with us--Kelli, Carli and I always went home for lunch--and surprisingly he decided to come with us!

I can remember one choir concert where Kelli, Jeff and I were all sitting together on the risers in the choir room just talking before the concert started. We were joking about a movie that had just come out (Shrek) and laughing at the donkey in that movie. Kelli and I thought we were so clever to christen Jeff as the new "Noble Steed." Anyway, Kelli started talking about Spectrum, and Jeff mentioned that he had been in it a couple of years ago. All of the sudden a repressed memory came back to me of a cute, dark-haired cowboy who sang an R.E.M. song, and I realized that Jeff was my secret Spectrum crush! How lucky was I!? I asked him if he had ever sang that song at a concert and he looked at me in a "how the heck do you know that and why are you stalking me?" kind of way. I didn't mind...I was just happy to finally get to meet the cowboy of my dreams.

Well, as the school year went on we got to be really close friends. I don't know how it got started, but there became a running joke between us that Jeff said that someday he would marry a girl who played guitar, and what-do-ya-know I played the guitar, so it mineswell be me. I, in my oh so coy and flirty way, adamently denied that we would ever get married. At the end of the year I was really sad that I wouldn't be able to have class with him anymore, and that we would probably never see each other again. I remember that Jeff wrote in my yearbook that, "I should write him when he was on his mission" and that "someday we would definitely get married." That made my heart flutter when I read it. Little did he and I know that someday we really would get married!

To be continued.