A blog by Cameron and Shannon

Hullo, my good friends! Welcome to Marverous Dot Com.

I’m sitting on the couch, watching Anthony Bourdain watching an Ghanian tribe make cornmeal over a fire. I have a Guinness, because it’s St. Patrick’s Day. It’s a pleasant evening all-around.

However, I’m not that big a fan of St. Patrick’s day. I usually forget which day it is (this year included — I thought it was on a Tuesday and then Shannon pinched me when I picked her up from work) and I can’t say I’ve ever drowned myself in green beer and shamrocks. Plus, I’m not Irish — I’m mostly Cajun, which is cooler anyway.

On St. Patrick’s Day four years ago, however, I was on spring break in North Florida. I was staying with my friend Caleb in Branford, FL (pop. 695), and we drove to Valdosta, Georgia to meet up with a bunch of folks at the Wooden Nickel Pub. I met Shannon that evening. I also remember not getting anything to eat because I was low on money, and Ray played Hank Williams (I think) on the jukebox, and apparently the Wooden Nickel has since been closed down and relocated, and the food wasn’t very good anyway (or I was just bitter because I didn’t order any). In any case, today is our 4-year anniversary of Meeting Each Other.

I can’t say it was love at first sight for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that we were both in friendationships at the time. I remember that I liked her jeans. I humbly admit that I also wasn’t looking for a girl with curly hair. (Big mistake. Turns out curly hair is awesome.)

Later in the week, Caleb and I spent a couple of days with his family in a vacation house on Vilano Beach. My path crossed somewhat with the other half of my friendationship, and she spent a few days in Vilano as well.

The only picture I have of Shannon from that trip, cropped and magnified. Metaphorically symbolic of how much we considered each other at the time.

One evening, while Caleb was attending to family business, the rest of us (Shannon, myself, my friendationhalf, her friendationhalf, Eb, and Allison) ended up hanging out at Shannon’s college rental house (the Pink Nasty) to eat ice cream sandwiches and play hide & seek. There’s a film snapshot somewhere in Shannon’s box of me hiding on top of the refrigerator. This picture isn’t it, but it still stands as some form of trip evidence. (I don’t have that many.)

One of the only pictures of me from that trip, looking young, foolish, and extremely sunburned.

The friendationhalves went their own way - for my part, she moved on about 5 days after we got back to Virginia. (I spent a weekend on Caleb’s dirty thrift-store couch eating 5-dollar Little Ceasar’s pizza to recover, and then I was fine. I also got pulled over for taking a U-turn at a no-U-Turn sign, but got off with a warning because the cop said I looked honest. I also probably looked terrible.)

It took a year, one spring break, and two group-based multi-state visits for us to eventually figure it out, but obviously certain things came together nicely — and here I am, married, in Nashville, on an Ikea couch, running out of Guinness, periodically switching between writing this and going up and down 2 flights of stairs to finish the laundry.

Apparently the Wooden Nickel has been torn down and relocated since then, or some such. I don’t remember it too much anyway. I do remember a girl with a lot of curly hair coming in the door.

Vilano Beach, March 19, 2004