Ten years ago today, I met my husband.
He showed up at the office a day early and if he had been less adventurous or more patient, if he had just followed his orientation schedule, I’d probably still be in Washington DC with an impressive career in international education.
He was one of nine mid-career professionals from around the world being hosted by the Washington College of Law as part of the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship Program. His welcome orientation was scheduled for August 4, 2005. I was spending August 3 sprawled on the floor with my hair in a pony-tail hole-punching, stacking, and assembling orientation binders. At least, that was my plan, but about mid-morning the office manager poked his head into the conference room and told me the Brazilian was at the front desk.
The office manager actually called him, “The Brazilian”. We all did, even program staff at the national level, because no one had a clue how to pronounce his name, which is quite a statement considering the range of nationalities around the office suite. My boss was out of the office, so I got to be the first to hear the correct pronunciation and fail repeatedly to say it. We would be dating before I could correctly say his name.
I saw him as soon as I stepped out of the conference room. He was standing by the reception desk just beyond several ubiquitous office cubicles, including my own, and I thought, “Wow, he’s white. I didn’t know Brazilians could be white.” It was the first in what has turned out to be a lifetime of revelations about Brazil, many of which have revealed an embarrassing number of unconscious assumptions based exclusively on Pelé.
My second thought on seeing him was “He’s really handsome.” My third was “I can’t believe he found this place.” The program office was located in a suite on the bottom level of a building two blocks down from the law school. The suite housed a variety of programs and offices, none of which had found a way to give directions that didn’t get most visitors lost. The Brazilian had successfully navigated the maps and directions while jet-lagged and operating in a foreign language. I was impressed.
But I’d been impressed by him for months. We received a binder on each Fellow that included a medical history, their complete program application with letters of recommendation, and the Fulbright selection committee’s evaluations. The Brazilian came with a letter of recommendation from a Supreme Court Justice and a clean bill of health. Not bad as boyfriend applications go. For my part, I’d been a college graduate for three months.
Truly I don’t know what about me got his attention. Maybe it was my stellar administrative skills or consistent punctuality. Somehow, I managed to make navigating my home country in my native language seem impressive. Thank god for home court advantage.
I wasn’t thinking relationship in that first moment. After recognizing that he was attractive, I went straight to professional mode. I took him on a tour of the school and to the bank. There is nothing romantic about banking or walking around DC at midday in August. Unless pit stains are considered a turn on. We grabbed lunch at the sandwich place across the street where I proved I was strictly business and indifferent to others by ordering the onion smothered Greek wrap. We chatted easily over lunch, and I believe that casual conversation over vegetarian wraps laid the groundwork for everything that followed.
If my boss had been around that morning, she would have been the one to take him to the bank and to lunch. If we had met the next day along with the entire group, we wouldn’t have had the rapport that made me the obvious choice to go with him apartment hunting while the other Fellows opened bank accounts. And if we hadn’t gotten to know one another while touring some rather frightening basement apartments in Northwest DC, it wouldn’t have felt perfectly natural to meet up for lunch periodically over the coming weeks.
By the time we went on our first date, we’d already opened a bank account, shopped for an apartment, and been subjected to a variety of team building exercises together. Rarely has a couple’s compatibility been so thoroughly tested. All we lacked was an astrologer’s blessing.
But all those moments came after that first meeting, when he showed up early and I mispronounced his name exactly ten years ago today.
