As requested - here is the story of how Dan and I met. (Told, obviously, from Lucy's point-of-view; I will do my best to incorporate Dan's point-of-view, but if you notice a certain slant... well, he can write a rebuttal if he so wishes.)
Dan doesn't actually remember the first time we met - but perhaps that's just as well because my first impressions of him weren't... well, they weren't what they are now. We met in 1999 in Madison, Wisconsin while I was going through new staff training with InterVarsity and Dan was back for the summer from Russia up to do some InterVarsity business. My only memory is of riding somewhere in a car together and feeling as if this was a loud, American... hmmm, know-it-all. Harsh, I know (I can hear the comments of my family now... something about a pot and a kettle...). I don't remember the second time we met, which was a few months later in Warsaw, Poland for the IFES-Eurasia new team members orientation. In my defense, I had just gotten off a trans-Atlantic flight and was a little disoriented. Dan, however, remembers a bus ride in which I apparently had a conversation with one of the British supervisors who was asking me about my Duke experience and postmodern literary theory or something of that nature.
In any case, the long and short of it is that Dan and I spent a week together in Poland in August of 1999, where I saw for the first time just how competitive at games he was and he learned that I could talk about postmodern literary theory even when suffering jet lag. And yet we became friends. We spent subsequent summer and winter conferences together, as we worked for sister student movement in Eurasia, and gradually got to know one another well enough to email and call in-between times... though never very frequently. In 2001-02 we served together on a committee to develop the curriculum for a new staff training institute in Eurasia, which I suppose solidified our by-then fairly firm friendship. We both ended up back in the US in 2003, both somewhat unexpectedly, and started seeing more of each other (meaning our twice-a-year meetings increased to, oh, four-times-a-year meetings!), making a point whenever he was in Madison or I was in Chicago of having dinner just to reminisce about the Russian-speaking world and assure one another that we weren't totally mad for feeling disoriented here in America. And for a long while it appeared that that would be the extent of our relationship, until one fateful night which Dan will have to tell you about sometime... perhaps in this blog, if I can twist his arm.
December 1st, Naperville, Illinois
