The way we were...

Annie and Bryce love to hear stories about things Eddie and I did growing up. They can’t get enough of hearing about the time I punched through the window on our screened-in porch or the time Eddie’s lunch got stolen by a class bully who graduated to robbing convenience stores and spent several years at Point of the Mountain.

A couple of months ago, Annie asked me how I met her daddy. I expected her to listen with the same rapt attention that she gives me when I tell her about how her Uncle Ethan broke his leg jumping off the swing set. But I guess it’s only the cautionary tales she likes to hear from me, because after a second or two, her eyes started to glaze over and she ran off to play with her Polly Pockets as soon as I stopped to take a breath.

But I want to get it written down. Maybe someday she’ll want to read it. Even though it is the geekiest story ever.

In the summer of 1992, I was feeling frustrated. I was 17 and had spent the last few months kissing all the wrong guys. And these were the good guys—the best of the LDS guys I could find among the slim pickings in Connecticut. But a friend told me about a computer camp at BYU that had everything I was looking for: two weeks on the campus of the school I hoped to attend the next fall, free admission, and three boys for every girl. So I signed up eagerly, flew out to Utah, and immediately hooked up with a curly-haired, Teva-wearing guy named David.
David? But this isn’t the story of Shelah and David. Well, while I was there, I also met other guys. I got a lot of these guys to help me with my homework (so I could spend more time with David). After all, I wasn’t there to learn about computers, so I didn’t care what I actually gained from the classroom experience. One of these guys was Eddie, who watched me from afar (other than a memorable conversation about the correct pronunciations of aunt and apricot) and decided that although I was cute, I wore too much lipstick and didn’t seem very intellectually curious. After all, I wasn’t even doing my own homework.

About eight months later, Eddie got an envelope in the mail from BYU. Inside were pictures of the other male and female Benson scholars who would be on campus in the fall. As Eddie scanned the pictures, he saw my face. Suddenly revising his opinion that I wasn’t very smart, he decided that he’d try to reconnect with me when we got to school in the fall.

Fast-forward four months. My roommate Leslie and I were enjoying our first day of freshman orientation. It was 100 degrees out and we were on the lawn of the Harman building, scoping out the guys, while groups of giddy freshmen folk danced around us. Suddenly, a tall, good-looking guy approached me. He looked vaguely familiar, but from where I didn’t know. But he had his line all prepared, “You’re Shelah Mastny from Stratford, Connecticut and you’re a Benson Scholar.”

Um…. Yeah. Who the hell are you?

But I got over thinking he was a stalker pretty quickly. After that, we spent lots of time walking hand-in-hand around campus and even more time hiding out in his old black Dodge ram truck with the awesome bench seat. We went to preference and homecoming and international cinema. And in March, he got his mission call to spend the next two years in Ukraine and Belarus. I waited. I knew what I wanted and it was worth waiting for. I wrote him a letter (two pages front and back) every other day for the whole two years. It's sickening, I know. He got home in June 1996, we got engaged in August and married the following April.

I think the average time from first date to marriage at BYU is something like seven months.

Ours took six times longer than that. But what can I say, we’d never settle for being average.