The Mug

I venture a guess that not many people have a mug with the date commemorating the day they first met their future spouse. I am lucky that one exists from the day that Russ first met me. It was September 15, 1989. He did not make himself known to me, but swears he decided he was going to marry me that day.

We both worked for the same company in New Jersey, OPEX. He was in engineering and worked at the headquarters. I worked in Washington, DC and was only at the home office a few times a year. I was there this day as our company had just moved into a new purpose built headquarters. I had been there for four years and Russ was a fairly new employee so I had no idea who he was.

As part of the grand opening of the building lots of friends of the firm were invited to tour it and I was demonstrating a new machine that Russ had created a number of features for, five of which he got patents on. He liked he way I showed off his machine. He told his friends he was going to marry me.

It took two years for me to know his name. He was very shy and I was not around that much. Thank goodness he never got over that first impression. And here we are 37 years later. Thanks to Russ’ Dad, who still has the mug and send Russ a picture of it on this day. He does not know the significance it holds for us.