You know, back when I met Simon, back in August of 2006, if you would have told me that I would one day be celebrating his 35th birthday with him while living together in Flagstaff, Arizona, I would have laughed. It's crazy to think how long ago 2006 really was, when sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday.
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| Simon and I at a St. Paul Saints game |
I met Simon in mid-August of 2006 when I was doing a travel assignment at a hospital in St. Paul, MN. It was my third travel assignment, my first two having been in the Phoenix metro. I was excited to be back in Minnesota for the end of summer and into the fall, my favorite time of year. I had rented a cute little studio apartment in the heart of downtown St. Paul in an old renovated building. It was a pretty sweet apartment…it had terra cotta floors, which were beautiful, a tiny little bathroom, a cute little kitchen equipped almost entirely from IKEA, a fireplace, and a Murphy bed that pulled out into the middle of the small living area. It was the perfect little space for the pugs and I to spend our first three months living in the Twin Cities. We went for walks everyday, sometimes to the state capitol building which was only a 10 minute walk away. Sometimes on my days off I would wander the skyway system, just to see where I would end up. I went to the Science Museum, I ate at little sidewalk cafes, I went to a Wild game at the Pepsi Center. I really enjoyed myself there.
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| Simon and I in the Japanese Garden in Golden Gate Park |
I had been working at the hospital for about 2 weeks when I had my first interaction with Simon. I should probably explain something about this hospital real quick before I get too far into the story. This hospital is a union hospital, and it was one of their first times hiring travel nurses for their general care floors (I believe they had been using travel nurses in their ICUs for quite some time). I and several other travel nurses had been hired to staff up the hospital in preparation for the roll-out of their new computer charting system, which was to be implemented in the spring. Computer charting roll-outs can be pretty intense, and they require a lot of classes which take nurses off their units to learn and practice the new system. Hiring temporary staff fills the holes left by staff members who are attending classes. Coincidentally, the computer charting roll-out was set to happen about a month before the current union contract was due to be renewed, which is a very stressful time for the hospital and its staff. In the past, there have been strikes, there have been firings, there have been hurt feelings…you get the idea. In the event of an imminent strike, a hospital will typically hire a bunch of travel nurses to fill the spots left vacant by the nurses who are on strike until a resolution can be met and the regular nurses will return to work. So you can about imagine the response I got when I showed up at this hospital, to interact with a staff that hadn't been prepared ahead of time for my arrival. They were suspicious of me and my fellow travel nurses. They were under the impression that we were in place to learn their system and their hospital so that when they went on strike in June (our presence basically confirmed to them that a strike was coming), there would already be several nurses there who were familiar with how things went. This was my first experience at a union hospital, and I was very taken aback by the outward and blatant hostility. Even after explaining over and over again that I was there to assist with the computer charting roll-out, I was still met with suspicion. There were some nurses who didn't even bother to learn my name…I was just "the traveler" to them for the entire 10 months I was there. One of the other travel nurses actually got called a "Scab" to her face, which is the name given by union workers to the non-union workers who step in for them in the event of a strike. It wasn't quite the situation that I had been anticipating walking into when I took the assignment, but I dealt with it and I explained myself to anyone who would listen. I feel that the hospital really dropped the ball on that one…I shouldn't have been the one explaining to them why I was there.
Anyway, so there's that. So my first shift with Simon I was doing a 12-hour shift from 7pm to 7am. He was going to come in at 11pm to work the last 8 hours of the shift with me as the charge nurse for the Orthopedic unit. Oh, another tidbit about this hospital…the travel nurses were always paired up with a charge nurse for our shifts…we were not allowed to sign off orders, nor were we allowed to take verbal orders from doctors or enter orders into the DOS based computer system that they already had in place…we were not to be trusted to act independently. Essentially, my role as an RN had been reduced to the role of something far less, having taken away a significant portion of what differentiates an RN from an LPN or a nursing assistant. Personally, it was a bit of a waste of my license, when they could have filled my position with an LPN and saved themselves some money. But I digress. So there I was, working on the Ortho unit awaiting the arrival of my babysitter for the rest of my shift. There were a few middle-aged ladies on the unit who were all atwitter at the idea of me working with Simon. Having never laid eyes on the guy, I asked them what the big deal was. They could hardly contain themselves. "He has the most gorgeous eyes." "He's so dreamy!!" were a couple of the comments I actually remember…the rest were something along those lines. I just had to laugh. Who was this dude? And honestly, like any other woman with a pulse, I can appreciate a good looking man. So, like the other nurses, I waited with anticipation for Simon's arrival.
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| Simon and I at the Bubble Room on Captiva Island, FL |
Around 10:45 he rolled onto the unit in what I can only describe as a harried pace. If you've never seen Simon at work, you have no idea how fast that man can walk. He can walk faster than I can jog. I don't know how he does it, but he does. So he blows onto the unit like he got thrown there by a tornado. The giddy nurses attempted to introduce him to me. He took one look at me, instantly looked away, and ducked into the locker room without so much as a hello. Whatever good looks he may have possessed at that moment were instantly negated by what was perceived by me to be a really shitty attitude. Our first night working together it was just Simon, me, and 12 patients. I think he maybe said 5 whole sentences to me, all of them patient related. It was really awkward. It's hard to work a night shift when you're working it with someone intent on saying absolutely nothing to you. I depend on my coworkers at night to keep me awake, as those hours from 2-5am when all the patients are sleeping are the hardest to keep one's eyes open. I got through it. And after that I dreaded being floated to the Ortho unit because I knew that he was always charge nurse, and being the inept travel nurse, I would be doomed to be assigned to be his partner.
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| Simon and I at Gooseberry Falls, North Shore, MN |
I don't know how long it took for him to finally open up to me, despite me trying every single night to get at least something out of him. I literally tried everything. Asked him what kind of music he liked, where he liked to eat, what he liked to do, what part of town he lived in. All innocuous questions and innocent attempts at getting to know this stranger I had to interact with and spend multiple nights a week with. Almost every attempt at conversation was shot down by curt responses and a lack of interest. I can honestly say that up until meeting Simon, I don't think I'd ever met anyone more disinterested in being friendly. Of course, it turns out that there was more to the story than what I was perceiving, but I didn't know that at the time. I just thought he was an angry man. An angry man who ate really weird food. I was always trying to get a look at all the weird stuff he brought in these tiny little plastic containers. Food unidentifiable by sight or smell. Not surprisingly, he didn't want to talk about what he was eating either.
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| Getting ready to go to the Keane concert in St. Paul |
So it went on like that for a few months. I renewed my contract for another 7 months because I just wasn't ready to leave Minnesota yet, and truth be told, I was really enjoying living in the big city. By the time December rolled around (5 months after I had started at the hospital), Simon was finally able to make some small talk. We talked about music, we talked about our families, we talked about places we'd traveled…we finally talked about some of that weird food he was always eating. It also turns out that Simon and I were assigned to have our computer classes at the same place on the same day. We were in different classrooms, but we saw each other on our breaks. It was on one of these breaks that he gave me a CD of some of his favorite songs. Random. It had really good music on it and to this day it's still one of my favorite music compilations by him. Now, having grown up in the generation of the mix-tape, I couldn't help but wonder if there was something else behind this CD, as traditionally you only give a mix tape to someone in whom you show an interest romantically. Turns out he made CD compilations for just about anyone, but it was a thought that lodged itself in the back of my head nonetheless. We had become friendly enough for me to know that he had a girlfriend anyway, so I didn't let myself think too much about it. But of course, I wondered.
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| Simon and I on Madelaine Island in Wisconsin |
Which then brought us to March, when I noticed that his MySpace status has been changed from 'in a relationship' to 'single.' Yes, this was back during the time when everyone was using MySpace. I think Facebook might still have only been available to kids with an active college email account, but I don't know for sure. In any case, more people I knew were using MySpace than Facebook. So his status changed. And coincidentally, I had just broken up with a guy that I had been casually dating on my volleyball team. And then, Simon would randomly call me asking me to hang out with him and his friends at an Irish pub in St. Paul. Or just to see what I was doing. Or to go out for breakfast in the morning after working all night. Of course, knowing that he was newly single after being in a relationship for an indeterminate amount of time, I didn't think it appropriate to think too much into this newfound interest he was suddenly showing in me. We were friends. Pretty much all his friends were girls, so I didn't think too much of it.
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| Simon and I at Franko and Andrea's wedding |
And then came the day that my family was in town to attend the court session for my little brother's minor consumption…which I had nothing to do with, despite what my dad initially thought. It just so happened that my little brother got caught drinking in the same county where I happened to be living…it's a big county, and I didn't even know he had been in town. I was supposed to work at 11pm that night, but I had my whole day free and met my family for lunch after the court hearing. We went to some Italian place in St. Paul kind of near the airport. I had myself a big plate of pasta and a big glass of wine. After lunch, my family went home and I called Simon with the giggles. He told me I should call out sick to work that night. With a courage driven by wine, I told him that I would only call out if he agreed to hang out with me that evening. He agreed, so I called out. We met up that evening at the Happy Gnome in St. Paul, which is still one of my favorite places to have some eats and a drink. Over glasses of Rogue Dead Guy ale (my suggestion, as I told him the story of how my friend Pritish somehow managed to have a keg of it sent all the way from Oregon to Minnesota for one of his parties) we hung out chatting for several hours. Two glasses in we were pretty buzzed, and neither of us okay to drive. So we sat there a while longer, just talking, laughing, and making fun of the bartender who described himself as a huge fan of the TV show Scrubs. After we sobered up, we headed to my place to watch the movie Sideways, which Simon had never seen. After the movie he gave me a big hug and left. I was somewhat confused. Did he hug all his gal pals like that? I had no idea, and despite being really into him, I was determined to keep things friendly because nothing is more awkward than interpreting someone's friendliness for intimacy. And he was a good friend. He was fun to hang out with, he was super goofy, he had a great sense of humor…all good qualities to have in a friend. I told myself that if we never became anything more than friends, I'd be okay with that. And I was.
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| Still one of my favorites of us…in LaCrosse, Wisconsin |
The next night, we were hanging out with his friends Erin and Rita. We were driving around St. Paul with nothing to do other than blast Weezer tunes and sing along at the top of our lungs. It was like being back in high school, and it was so much fun. Simon and I were in the back seat together when he texted me asking if I'd like to watch a movie again that night. So there we were, texting each other in the back seat of Rita's car, thinking we were being so clever. I'm pretty sure Erin and Rita knew what we were doing the entire time. So once again, Simon and I went to my place to watch a movie. We watched Grumpy Old Men, another favorite of mine given to me by my cousin Keri when I started travel nursing. She said that whenever she was homesick, she would watch Grumpy Old Men and it would transport her right back to Minnesota. It's a great movie for that, and one of the best Minnesota movies out there. Fargo is a close second, although it's not exactly a "warm fuzzies" kind of flick. Anyway, it was between Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men that Simon put his arm around me, snuggled in closer and we shared our first kiss. I knew then that I had exited the friend-zone. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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| Simon and I at Horseshoe Bend, Page, AZ |
So here we are. Living in Flagstaff, AZ, our first permanent residence since becoming a couple. We've traveled for work all over the country, living in places that our personal travels might never have taken us. We've made friends all over the country and we have favorite restaurants in some of the strangest places. He's introduced me to kayaking, paddle boarding, mountain biking, and thinking outside the box when it comes to eating. I'm sure I've introduced him to a few things as well…craft beers, pugs, road trips, and Jeeps. And through it all, we've done it side by side, spending almost every waking minute together. People think we're crazy, spending so much time together. They don't know how we do it, how we don't get sick of each other. And the truth is, we don't get sick of each other. If it weren't for work, we'd spend even more time together, and I'm confident that our relationship wouldn't change in the slightest. Shouldn't the person you spend your life with be the person you'd love to hang out with all day every day? Not that we have to do everything together…we have our own friends and our own interests, and we're content with giving each other some space when needed. But yeah, he's the first person I think about when I wake up in the morning, and the last person I think of when I go to bed at night. He's my best friend.
So here we are, he at 35 and me nearly there. At 27 years old when we started dating, 35 wasn't even on our radar. It was so far away. And still, here we are. I can't wait to see what the next few years bring, what the next few decades bring. Looking forward to them with open arms and a happy heart. Happy birthday to my favorite person in the world. :)
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| Simon and I near Fort Myers Beach, FL |
