March 27, 2005
My Love Story, part 1
I want to start telling one of my favorite stories ... my love story. That story hasn't really finished yet (it's only just begun), and I can't say that I really understand all of it that has taken place yet, but I can try.
Nicole Terese Leatherwood (Den Bleyker for most of her life) and I go way back. We were friends in kindergarten and first grade. Both her parents and mine were on the mission field in the Philippines in the early 1980's, and when they returned to the states, they both lived in the tiny Christian community of Rehoboth, New Mexico (just a couple of miles outside Gallup). While they never met on the field, it's virtually impossible to live in Rehoboth and not meet everyone who lives there. Since our families had the Philippines in common, it seems natural that they would become friends. And that I would play with their little girl, who was at that time probably 5 or 6, and I was 4 or 5. I don't remember very much that far back. I remember that she had the most wonderful Superman cartoon videos that I loved to watch, and that she always wanted to play Monopoly (at which she always won). Not too promising a beginning. I can't even remember what she looked like back then, though I have pictures of it. But I do remember her.
In 1990, my family moved out of Rehoboth and into Phoenix, Arizona. We spent the next year and a half there, and I went finished the second and third grade while there. It seems that even that early, Nikki and I wrote one another occasionally - she has a letter from me dating from the third grade. I have no recollection of writing this letter - my next memory of her is several years later.
In 1992, my family moved to Mongolia. My father went back to the States for a few months in 1994. While he was in the States, he visited the Den Bleyker family. When he came back, he brought me a letter from a girl I still remembered, however vaguely. I wrote her back. Thus began an unbroken correspondence that would culminate in my marriage to her this last August.
Our letters were short and unromantic. The older I got, the more sanitary and careful I became in my relationships with girls (this, of course, has a reason, but it's not part of this story. It certainly wasn't Nikki's fault). I had not yet developed a garrulous quality in my letters - that was to come later. And yet ... I probably still had a crush on her. The more it grew, the more I kept it out of my letters (or tried to). I always felt enormously special in getting letters from her. I was always delighted when she signed her letters "love, Nikki" (and fiercely denied it as my siblings teased me). I played with romantic thoughts about her and daydreamed a few times about having a romantic relationship with her (even marrying her), but no more than I think every boy does about a girl he knows.
But we always kept writing each other. We never stopped. Oh, letters were rare (four or five a year, tops), but they were consistent. That, more than anything else, is why I'm married to her now. She always wrote back. She didn't always write what I wanted to, particularly as my letters grew more personal and loquacious, but she always wrote back. And I slowly fell in love with her without knowing it. I certainly suspected myself and my affections, but I was never sure and I certainly never admitted it to myself that I was falling in love with her. That would come later.
