Present Over Perfect

the first day of that new job, I met Aaron. I’d actually met
him one time before—I watched his band play once when I
was back for a Christmas break during college.
We were talking about that moment just recently. We
were twenty, maybe.
What would we have thought if someone had whispered
to us, “That’s the person who will affect your life more than
any other individual, forever. Your child will have her eyes,
his voice”? How can it be that all those years ago something
inside each of us sought out the other, believed so deeply in
what the other might bring to our life? And how can it be
that it is true?
Aaron told me he thought I was pretty for the first time
while we kayaked together at a camp in Lake Geneva. I
made it awkward, of course, disagreeing with him, telling
him that it was a nice thing to say, but it wasn’t true,
obviously, empirically. Poor dude. Twenty-two years old,
trying to talk to a girl he works with, and now she’s
unloading everything she learned in Women’s Studies and
every tender part of her heart, all wrapped up in theories and
feminism. It took me about a decade and a half to just learn
to say thank you. Full disclosure: I’m still working on that
one.
He was a worship leader, and while I’d established pretty
firmly in college that I had a thing for musicians, I did not
have a thing for worship leaders. Please. I barely had a thing
for worship at that point, and I read onto him all the
stereotypes—he’s uncomplicated, happy-clappy all the time.