Sidenote: it was a few months later that I discovered this was why many people began telling my parents I'd "joined a cult" and was getting brainwashed/scary--I didn't know that there had been a cult years before known as "the family." In retrospect, it's a bit funny that I was responsible for helping create one of the ONLY perceived cults at GC at the time--but I'm sure it scared my parents to death at first. Now? They're crazy about this big group of wonderful people that graced our house at christmas for parties and occasionally as a few dropped by during summers or after graduation.
We took this analogy so that that by the fall of my sophomore year, we had a 'family tree' that placed everyone's relationships to each other...and then we also started adding people in classes behind us. I'd met James through choir and "the breakfast club" (very few people utilized the dining commons for breakfast, but I was an early riser and so was Erika--James' girlfriend at the time and my choir roommate. We sort of dragged him into coming). Through me, he met Rob and it was like brothers separated at birth. They became roommates by second semester that year and were often seen together programming, gaming, and finding new ways to steal control of classroom equipment from the professors during class and play pranks (those are fantastic stories for another time). As James and I spent almost all of interterm together on choir tour in England, we also got to know each other pretty well. Rob made sure he was added to this crazy family tree.
Fastforward a couple of years. It was with fear and excitement that I greeted fall 2003--the year my sister, Evangeline, would begin college. She'd had a bit easier time finding a friend group in high school, but I still hoped that she'd find a group of friends as welcoming as mine when she came to college...but I didn't want to smother her (I wanted her to find her own way and not feel tagged as "Emily's sister" the same way I'd felt confined as "Hartley's daughter" when I arrived). So I waited. Her honors group? Not QUITE as much fun as mine where we'd had a mix of guys and girls that got along well (I mostly hung out with the boys, which shouldn't surprise anyone--especially those that know me well)--but there was this BIG gaggle of girls there who were mostly friendly. Like my sister, many were education majors. Maybe this is why Jaime stood out to me. She was INTIMIDATING to me.
Why? Well...1) she was really pretty quiet around people who didn't know her very well. 2) She was a math and religion major. I'd always felt somewhat intimidated and in awe of folks in hard sciences and here was a woman who was a math major. Not only that, she was a solid, confident (though not arrogant) math major her freshman year. Most freshman have no clue as to what they want to do. She did. I was a senior and found this calm confidence a bit unnerving. While Heather (Evangeline's roommate) and Christy (one of her best friends) knew who I was and would talk to me in passing, I knew of Jaime primarily from her connections to older honors kids--Kate and Becca, who I'd met the year before and who were her roommates.
Rob and I got married in January (I finished school a semester early and worked as a newspaper reporter while he finished up), and so Rob was no longer James' roommate by about the time they started dating. We heard rumors of their two hour long walks though and it became a source of amusement for the guys to tease James about his walking habits.
We spent the next 2 years up in Champaign-Urbana, and so didn't really get to know Jaime very well until right before their wedding, but we KNEW James was head over heels. Like I said, I primarily knew her through other friends and through my sister. We moved to St. Louis right before my sister started her senior year of college. I was teaching a bit at SIUE and GC and evening ESL, and Rob was writing code for a company while James was working for AT &T and living up the road. We hung out fairly often just grabbing pizza, playing games, or watching movies. In March or so, James called Rob and said, "so I hear you don't know you're in my wedding." So it went--my husband was in the wedding party, my dad was conducting the ceremony and...I sort of watched from a far. Out of our small St. Louis "group" that was forming, Rob was the only one married until James brought in Jaime. She was a math and religion major. She was an incredible baker, I learned quickly,...and she, unlike my sister and her closest friends, was not very gregarious. I would have to push out of my comfort zone (my mostly introverted 'bubble') in order to begin conversations.
One of the first? Was trying to explain this weird "family tree" and the "GC family" she'd heard so much about--especially now that she learned the master document had been altered after their wedding, and she'd been added as a branch on this family tree. It grew a bit easier after that--especially once we helped her move into James' apartment and I saw the massive white hand-made bookshelf she had and heard about all the books that went on it :D I found it much easier to talk once I found out she was also a bibliophile.
One of the first? Was trying to explain this weird "family tree" and the "GC family" she'd heard so much about--especially now that she learned the master document had been altered after their wedding, and she'd been added as a branch on this family tree. It grew a bit easier after that--especially once we helped her move into James' apartment and I saw the massive white hand-made bookshelf she had and heard about all the books that went on it :D I found it much easier to talk once I found out she was also a bibliophile.
