I once asked my parents how it was that they happened to meet and fall in love. At the time, it was just getting dark out and we had just finished dinner. I think my mom was just about to do the dishes, but jumped on the opportunity to put it off. My parents exchanged looks and I could almost feel it in the air that we were being taken back in time.

“It started,” my mother began, “with your geeky father.”

This of course was the first time I had ever heard that my calm and cool dad used to be a geek.

“We were both living in a small town and I appeared to be some kind of an accident magnet for your mother,” my dad continued.

“Thankfully we grew out of that stage. We met when your mother ran me over with her car,” they exchanged smiles as if it were a fond memory.

“There was no serious damage done. The serious damage happened the second time.”

The story continued. Apparently after the first accident with the car, they kept meeting my accident. They would meet in the store and my mom would run him over with shopping carts, or cause end cases to fall on him. It was almost like clockwork, the moment he saw her something would go wrong.

It got to the point where my dad never went shopping anymore. He almost never went out. Things were fine for a while. He began getting used to not having an injury when he went to bed at night. And then, just as life was getting back to normal, he realized that he had begun to miss her. The whole time my dad was taking the break from my mom, she thought that maybe he had gone on some chess club trip or something.

So my dad, the dog, decided that he would ask her out.

Again my parents threw that “fond memory” smile at each other. When no one answered as to how it happened, I asked.

It turned out there was another thing my mom always did when she saw my dad. They have the exact same taste and so when my dad went to the store to get something, my mom would grab the last one (and knock something over on him by accident.)

So my dad devised a plan. He went and found an apology card and wrote a message on it. Just as he had suspected, my mom came for the card. When she opened it she found my dad’s message:

I’m flattered you were buying me an apology card, but how about you apologize in person over dinner with me.

–Geeky Guy you keep running over

Of course my mom said “yes.”

The night of their first date, my dad said he was really nervous. He decided to walk to the restaurant. Little did he know what a bad mistake that was. Somehow my mother managed to run him over again. This time, he broke his leg. She felt so bad that she went to the hospital to see him every day til he got better. I think, sometime while my dad was in the hospital things began to change. They began growing out of their accident prone stage, and my mother never caused serious damage to my dad again (except the time she broke his nose, by accident.)

“That was how we fell in love.”