Going on 19

Excy and I had our 19th wedding anniversary last Tuesday. I was sick most of that week so we celebrated by going out to brunch Sunday at a fabulous restaurant. We ran into some friends waiting for a table (great minds think alike), so we all ate together. We have nothing on my parents, who celebrated their 59th June 9.

The story of our meeting is worthy of a Nora Ephron treatment (anyone know her?). I was working as an associate editor for ARCHITECTURE magazine in DC. My editor-in-chief flipped a file on my desk and told me to interview this architect for one of my columns on new buildings. Usually when an editor calls an architect and says they're interested in their work, they fall all over themselves with excitement (competitive market -- lots of architects and fewer magazine pages to highlight their work). So I was unprepared for a snarky response when I told him who I was and why I was calling. "What did you do? Pull that out of the round file?" Annoyed at his remark, I told him I could tell he wasn't interested and I was sorry to bother him...

Thirty minutes or so later he called up and apologized, saying that we had the slides for so long that he'd tried to get them returned, only to be told they had gotten lost...after that kerfluffle, we moved on, and I interviewed him by phone. Listening to the tape later, I was surprised that it was about 30 minutes of project discussion, and 20 minutes of flirting. Hummmmm. We talked on the phone every day for 2 weeks. After I had finished the column, I thanked him for his help, and said how much I had enjoyed speaking with him. The next day, he called: "Hey, kid, I just missed talking to you." Obviously, we couldn't talk on office time, so the next thing I knew, he was calling me every night about 11 p.m. I think he was just checking up on me to make sure I was home!! After 6 weeks of this, he said he wanted to meet me in person. My status then was, I had been divorced about 2 years, and was dating an architect in NY (loved the fact it wasn't in the same city), and did not want to get attached. So I kept putting him off. I enjoyed having a phone buddy. I had a sense that if we met it could get serious. Finally he said this was ridiculous and he was picking me up for lunch Saturday. I told him I couldn't, I had to go into work. He said he'd pick me up for lunch at work. I finally relented. As I sat waiting for him in the lobby it occurred to me we hadn't discussed what either of us really looked like...all I knew was he was tall. It was deserted in the building, though. Suddenly a tall dark handsome man pushed through the swinging doors. My exact immediate thought was: "Shit, I don't want to get married again!"

Many many years later, I learned the other side of the story: after he hung up from that first phone call, he called my editor and asked what was going on -- that he'd always had the editor or a higher-up editor review his projects (conceited or what?!) and Mr Canty replied, "You want to meet this girl. Don't you have a restaurant in MD or something? Take her to lunch." Excy: "What? I've never had to take my editor to lunch before!" Mr Canty: "You aren't listening to me. You want to meet this girl."
Mr Canty playing cupid?? I wish I had known this...he died awhile back.