Awesome Love Story

This is a story worth telling.

On Saturday, a person my husband and I have each known longer than we've known each other got married.  Dan and Todd worked together behind the bar at many a tavern and restaurant over the years.  Dan served me beers and told me jokes and tolerated my friends and all their misbehaviors.  Todd and I have a long history with Dan.

Dano is one of those people that everyone loves.  EVERYONE.  There is not a person on the planet who doesn't like Dano.  And if there is one, I'd like to personally kick his ass.  Which made it all the more heartbreaking when Dano fell ill a number of years ago.  Life had kicked him in the teeth and between the pain he was in from a bad breakup, and managing a friendly bar where the liquor flowed, Dano found himself in a bad spot.  Well, actually, our friend Sara found him in a bad spot, on the floor of his condo.

Dano spent several weeks in the hospital, and even more weeks recouperating at his parents' home.  We thought he wouldn't make it.  We all visited him in the hospital, and talked in hushed tones about his condition. But he's a trooper, and he recovered to become more healthy and happy than he'd ever been before.  He quit the bar business, got a job at the library, took up running, and settled into his new normal.

A confirmed bachelor, Dano oft professed his scorn for the institution of marriage.  Twice burned, he had chosen a single life, free of the complications and entanglements women brought to it.  We all got it.  No one questioned that Dan was not the marrying kind.  Which made it all the more surprising when he appeared at a function last year with a beautiful girl on his arm, and announced they were getting married.

It turns out, Dan had known this girl since middle school.  He'd always liked her, always been too afraid to ask her out, and finally lost touch with her after high school.  And then, last year, Dan's mother died.  And Karen, his now bride, read in the paper about the visitation.  Being the sort of person she is, she thought she'd go pay her respects to the mother of one of her classmates from twenty years before.  Dan, delighted to see her, felt awkward about picking up chicks at his mother's funeral.  But the family encouraged him to bring her to the house for drinks and food after the visitation, and she agreed to come along.

The rest, as they say, is history.  The symmetry of their meeting - on his mother's death, another woman steps in to love and care for him - is, of course, beautiful and a little uncanny.  But it gets better.  Stay tuned for Part II of this Awesome Love Story.