Third First Anniversary

By Alex T. Valencic - August 18, 2010

On 16 August 2007, Gretchen and I went out for dinner and a movie. The reason for this outing was simple: we were both bored and had nothing better to do. Despite the fact that I had just recently seen "The Bourne Ultimatum", Gretch wanted to see it, so I figured, what the heck, it was a good movie, why not go see it again? And so we did. We were both hungry, so we went to dinner at El Toro in Champaign before the movie. I paid. And thus it began.

We saw each other every single day until the Monday before Thanksgiving that year, because I had a lot of assignments I needed to complete, and I realised that if I stayed in Champaign, I wasn't going to get them done. I came back to town on Thanksgiving Day to catch dessert with Gretch's family, and I failed to keep track of how often we saw each other after that, although I'd say it was probably close to 95% of the time between Thanksgiving and our wedding on 20 June 2008.

16 August 2008 rolled around, and I realised that Gretch and I had never celebrated the anniversary of when we started dating. So I suggested we celebrate our first First Anniversary. I am honestly not sure what we did for that anniversary, nor do I recall what, exactly, we did for our second First Anniversary. This year, though, we did something special, mostly because our second Second Anniversary was spent traveling back from Nebraska with Gretch's family and it was also Fathers' Day (sometimes known as Falker Satherhood). What with everything else going on, our anniversary came and went with very little fanfare.

So this past Monday, which was our third First Anniversary, we went out to Moraine View State Park, in keeping with the tradition I established of going to an Illinois State Park for our anniversary (last year, you may or may not recall, we went to Starved Rock State Park). Moraine View has long held a special place in my memory as the site of a regular Valencic Family Pilgrimage in the summer to spend the day at Locust Beach at Dawson Lake in the park. Sadly, this tradition ended some years before my baby sister, Ariana, was born, which means it was at least seventeen years since I was last there, and possibly closer to twenty.

The beach was considerably smaller than I remembered it, but Gretch and I had a fun afternoon swimming in the lake and laying out in the sun. Except that we kind of spent a bit too much time in the sun. Oh, and we don't have any sunblock. So, there was one downside to the whole thing. Gretch and I can both easily pass, from the backside especially, as members of the British Army circa the last 18th and early 19th centuries.