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Tonight we’re off to a dinner and movie with two of my cycling buddies and their wives. Actually one wife, I knew BEFORE the cycling buddy. Actually WAY BEFORE cycling was even in the picture. Actually… wait this is getting confusing. Let me just tell the story…Back in the early to mid ’90s I worked in a national book chain, B. Dalton Booksellers. It started as a Christmas help position, and I worked my way up to store manager. I worked in three of the four stores in the Capital District, and ended up working with Shannon a couple times; at one point she was Assistant Manager while I was a Third Key, which is fancy-speak for one step above Grunt, “but we trust you enough to open the store on time once in a while”.

Once in a while I helped out at other stores when we had big returns lists or strip lists. These were long and frustrating projects because you didn’t always find the titles to pull off the shelves and were constantly interrupted by those nagging customers wanting to spend their money (and ask stupid questions). So every so often, we’d do one of these projects after hours and get help from other stores.

Here is when I met John. Or maybe I met him first during a visit he may have made to see Shannon… I don’t remember exactly. Suffice it to say we met in our bookstore years. Fast forward a couple years… John & Shannon get married. We all drift away from the bookstores since the mall division was getting hammered by the book superstore moving into the area and sucking up all the book business. Don’t even get me STARTED on that rant!

More years go by and we don’t meet, don’t call, just basically do our own things. Sometimes I’ll see John at the butcher shop in Malta and we’d exchange pleasantries, but never make it past “How’s the house?” or “How’s Shannon/Steph?” type questions.

The one fortuitous day, Steph and I head to Ruby Tuesday’s in the Wilton mall for dinner and bump into Shannon who is waiting to meet John for dinner as well. Well, of course we need to eat together… why not? So we have a lovely dinner, and conversation was bright and enjoyable. Unfortunately, dinner had to come to an end and the time to part came.

Now here is where I like to take some credit for the next action. The credit is debatable… I’d like to think we would have rebuilt a a new-found and more lasting set of relationships regardless of how we left that dinner. John alluded to it in a recent post of his and made me think there might be an anecdote worth telling. I said to our little dinner party, “Now instead of just saying ‘let’s get together again’ and then just drift apart, why don’t we make a date right now for the next time we’ll get together?” So we all agreed on the next date and the rest is history. We’ve grown closer as friends, Steph & I were there the morning their child was born, and John and I have both cycled more than 15,000 miles each. (John’s actually over 23,000 so far.)

The other cycling couple we’re meeting tonight, is Anthony & Annette. I don’t quite have as colorful a story to tell about them (sorry). But they’ve grown into good friends rather quickly, and we’re looking forward to spending our vacation with them in June down in the Outer Banks. An aside: we’ve got a beach house and a total of eleven of us will be lounging about for a full week in the sun and sand!

John and I kept seeing Anthony on group rides and starting to do some riding together outside of the group. We’d alternate between driving down to his neck o’ the woods in Ravena (about 50 minutes) or him coming up here to ride together.

Pretty soon the natural next steps happened… planned a century ride with a barbeque afterwards, got the wives to join in the post-ride food and socializing. And it took off from there.

This entry was posted Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Family & Friends. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.