On September 24th my wife and I celebrated our 24th year of “being an item”. It was homecoming week 1994 at Northern State University, Gypsy Days as it’s called, when we shared our first dance at The Zoo Bar. That night may have been our first dance, but we had known each other for a few years, as we were both biology majors and had several classes together.

One class, I believe it was invertebrate zoology, we ended up assigned to the same lab table, which improved my attendance for that course significantly. There wasn’t much of a correlation between my perfect attendance and my grade, which was more than a few letters below perfect. I was there in body, but I found her much more captivating than anything Dr. Wright was attempting to get into my head.

Dawn, on the other hand, was a serious student who worked hard to achieve the best grades she could in every class she took. A very foreign concept to me, but one I admired her for. I figured I’d just enjoy the time with her while I could, keep providing a bit of comedy relief at our lab table, simply because I liked to see her laugh. That would have to suffice, because it was obvious she was in a league far removed from the one I was bumbling around in.

A year or so later, I was in danger of failing college algebra, actually I was failing college algebra, and Dawn agreed to put her patients and sanity to the test, and attempt to tutor the untutorable. If there’s a place in your brain responsible for comprehending math, that place doesn’t exist in my head, or it was shoved aside to make room for song lyrics, movie quotes, and useless trivia. So it goes.

We would meet in the library a few nights a week, apparently that’s where serious students go to do serious studying, and she would point out the errors in my mathematical ways. She did a lot of pointing, but the lyrics, quotes, and trivia refused to concede any ground. As Merle Haggard once sang, “mamma tried”. She’s stubborn, and like Sisyphus, she pushed and pushed and pushed, but my brain kept rolling back down, leaving a wake of mangled, unrecognizable, algebraic equations in its path.

I got a solid “D” in that class. I’m not sure if the professor, a kindly old man, was too tired to fail me and face the futility of the matter for another semester, or if my tutor came through? I’d like to think Dawn came through for me, just as she has every day since.

You never know where life is going to take you, or what it has in store for you once you get there. It took me, in my 58' Chevy Biscayne, south out my little town to Aberdeen, South Dakota. It took me to Northern State University, where 24-years ago I put on a toga to celebrate homecoming (as any self-respecting college student should do). It took me to The Zoo Bar. It took me to where our dance began.