On How to Win His Heart

Project 365 - December 21








Today is my anniversary.














This is what started the romance.










I first met Tracy when we were in our mid-20s, in a little home church in North Carolina. We were no more than brother and sister in Christ, but I had a great deal of respect for him. Within a couple of years we had both moved away, me to another small town in NC, him overseas.

Fast forward ten years.

I had moved back to the first small town, bought a house and settled down. Tracy's family lived in the same area, and he had come back for a few months to visit them before starting his residency.

Over the years we had both kept in touch with a mutual friend, and it was through her that Tracy contacted me to see if I would be interested in a computer he had to give away. I was thrilled with the offer, as I had no computer, and we set a time one evening the following week for him to bring it over. I was beside myself with excitement at the thought of joining the 21st century online!

In spite of the years that had passed since we last talked, I was my usual chatty self on the appointed evening, and it wasn't until Tracy was starting to leave that I thought with regret that I had nothing to give him in return. It happened to be Christmas time, and I was in the habit of having extra tins of chocolate chip cookies under the tree for just such an emergency, so I grabbed one quickly and gave it to him with my thanks as he headed out the door.

It wasn't until he left that the ridiculousness of that trade occurred to me...I had given him a tin of cookies in exchange for a computer. I was mortified, but that faded as soon as I began surfing the web in the comfort of my own home the next day. :)

I had no idea the full impact of that transaction till several months later, when Tracy asked me to marry him. It turns out he had subsisted for the past 20 years on a diet of milk and cookies, and there was nothing I could have given him that would have hit closer to his heart than a tin of homemade cookies.




I had him at that tin. :)