Becoming The Browns - Part 5

You have all waited so patiently for the next part of the story.  And I appreciate that.  I really do.  It turns out that BEING the Browns has been a lot more important in the last few months than describing how we BECAME the Browns.

So, without further ado…

 

The phone call from the ex-roommate’s ex-boyfriend, I’ll call him Sparty since he’s an Michigan State alumnus.  It was so unexpected and odd.  I knew this guy relatively well – he’d visited her while we were still in college and spent plenty of time at our old apartment.  But he and I were never friends.  I don’t think we’d ever had any interaction outside of things involving my friend.  And in retrospect, I’m not even sure how he had my number.  But he did, and he called.

 

That conversation changed a whole lot of things in the course of my life.  But I’ll get there.  For now you need to know that we talked for hours that night about anything and everything.  And I learned that we had a lot in common – politics and goals in life and family background.  I was amazed that I had never known how similar we were.  I think he was surprised too.  I’ve often asked myself why he called that day.  I suspect he was just lonely.  Sparty and my friend had broken up about 5 months before and it wasn’t exactly an amicable split.  And he didn’t have roommates and most of his college friends were living in Michigan so I think his circle of friends in the Windy City was small.  On top of that, while I will defend my friend to the end, I wasn’t always happy with her choices during the breaking up with Sparty.  So I think he thought I might be a sympathetic ear and a friendly voice.

 

We made plans at the end of that conversation to get together.  It wasn’t a date exactly – I was certain he had no romantic intentions toward me but the setting seemed date-like.  Drinks and dinner at a local restaurant.  But on a weeknight after work.  We had a nice time and so we kept getting together on a semi-regular basis.  Probably every other week or so.

 

One specific memory I have is that we had plans on a weekend and I drove to his place but instead of finding him home, his dad was there.  He said Sparty was actually at the car dealership purchasing a car but wanted me to wait for him.  So his dad actually drove me over to the dealership and I got to be the first to ride in his brand new car.  (a Mitsubishi Eclipse, for curious minds.  Even more curious, Mr. Brown thinks the Eclipse is strictly a girl’s car.)  The next thing I knew it was the 4^th of July and we went together to his parent’s house in western Michigan.  We had a great time, watching fireworks, going to town festivals and just generally hanging out.  At that point we still weren’t really dating.  But you wouldn’t know it to look at us.  It was on that trip that I started to think that maybe I should stay in Chicago.

 

Ah – here is where I should mention that before Sparty and I started getting chummy I had been researching the options for going back to grad school at Georgia Tech.  In fact, I’d actually had my original admission deferred to Fall 2000 and had been apartment hunting in Atlanta.  I may have even made a deposit on a place (I know I had one picked out).

But spending time with Sparty made me think that I couldn’t leave Chicago.  I loved Chicago.  I had so many friends there and while I really disliked my job I did adore being in the city.  So I made another monumental decision.  Some might say monumentally stupid but I have to remind myself that if it weren’t for Sparty I never would have become Mrs. Brown.  

 

The decision – instead of moving to Atlanta I would stay in Chicago.  I still enrolled at Georgia Tech through their distance learning program (the precursor to today’s online learning – I watched videos of lectures, faxed in homework and took exams by proxy) and started working on my Master’s degree.  And I moved from the city to the suburbs – just a few miles away from Sparty’s apartment.

 

This was the honeymoon phase of my relationship with Sparty.  We loved spending time together and seemed to be headed in the same direction in life.

 

And what about Mr. Brown during this period?  He was still doing his dating juggling act – not very successfully, I might add.