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If the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor, my parents would never have met.
If my cousin had not moved to Los Angeles, I might never have met the love of my life.
How people find each other has always fascinated me.
Some people know each other all their lives, and some meet in school. Their stories are wonderful. To have a lifetime of shared experiences and friends must make an especially strong bond. As if you had always been family.
But for those of us whose paths crossed seemingly at random, the relationship can be equally precious. This April, my husband and I will celebrate our 32nd wedding anniversary, but we were together for almost two years before that, and had met even earlier, when we were both in relationships with other people. So we became good friends first, long before we became lovers.
My mother and father both joined the Navy right after Pearl Harbor. He was from California, and she was from Texas. Later, they met in Pensacola, Florida, because my mother was teaching pilots and photographers how to use oxygen during high-altitude flying, and my dad was a photographer.
It was a real war-time romance. They were engaged within a month, two weeks later they were married, and shortly after that, my dad shipped out to the Pacific, and the Navy finally found a Laboratory Technologist position for my mom in Seattle – the field for which she had trained in college.
I came along after the war, exactly on the day of their fifth wedding anniversary. So if not for the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor, my parents would have married other people, and had different children. Fate?
The two sides of my family couldn’t be more different. My dad was the odd-man-out in his liberal, creative family of great huggers. My mom fit pretty well in her conservative Southern family.
My cousin from the Texas branch who moved to California was “the other one” besides me who didn’t fit in that side of the family. They expected him to be a doctor, but he wanted to go into show business. Since I was the only other one of “those” in the family, naturally he stayed with me when he first arrived in L.A., and I introduced him to my old acting coach.
Then he got a place of his own, and loved to throw parties. It was at one of these parties that I met his friends from the University of Texas who had also come to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune. They were forming a theatre company, and when they found out I was directing a play, came to see it, and invited me to join their group.
That’s where I met my future husband. He and my cousin hadn’t ever met. If my cousin had moved to New York instead of Los Angeles, my husband and I would probably never have met either.
So how did you find “The One?” Or did they find you? Or has Fate yet to take a hand?