1991

One photo is not adequate to sum up my year of two loves.


This is Ryan, posing in the fog at Hebron Academy in Maine, where he attended high school. We met during New Student Days at Grinnell College and have been together ever since. While he has never specifically asked me to marry him, we both assume that is where were heading. And now that we're college seniors, that future seems inevitable.

However, Ryan is doing a 3-2 program: three years at Grinnell and two years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, so he is spending 1990-91 in Upstate New York. I plan to join him there after graduation.


In the meantime, I've managed to schedule my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays only. I take full advantage of my four-day weekends by traveling extensively to SCA events. I'm known in the Society of Creative Anachronism as Suvetar Kalevalainen.

At one of these events, I feel under the weather and realize that I've come down with the chicken pox. I spend finals week in Des Moines staying with my friend Melissa and her roommates--all of whom have already had the chicken pox. If you look close enough, I'm still a little scabby in all my graduation photos.


Most of my family, including my dad, maternal grandma, and my dad's cousin Bill, attend my college graduation. I graduate with a degree in American Studies with departmental honors. Ryan drives his Volvo station wagon from New York to receive his bachelors degree in physics.

It is at dinner that same night that I first question my future with Ryan. Although he's met my father before, their scary similarity--down to the fact that they are both left-handed physics majors--begins to creep me out. I don't want to marry my dad. Not realizing there is any problem, Ryan goes back to New York.

I move into Melissa's house for the summer and the very next weekend I meet Kalos. It's The Artist and I'm immediately attracted to him. He's nothing like any man I've me before--and specifically nothing like my dad.


By July I've broken up with Ryan and I'm exclusively dating The Artist. He lives in St. Joe, Missouri where he spends his workweek as an apprentice electrician. He spends his weekends the same way I do--traveling around the mid-west to medieval recreation events.

I love the friends I've made in the SCA, especially a bunch of people who live in Lawrence, Kansas. I move there at the end of the summer. Since this is The Artist's home-away-from-home, I see him often, but fool myself that he (and everyone else) doesn't know I'm chasing him.


Just six months after we meet, The Artist and I are married in December 1991 at the courthouse in Lawrence. No one in my family attends.