We met on St. Patrick’s Day, 28 years ago.

That night featured a slew of parties, attended with a gaggle of girlfriends wearing shamrock hats and “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” pins.  We were loud and drunk and given license by the holiday to be boisterous, if not obnoxious.  We party-hopped across Manhattan: an Irish bar in Hell’s Kitchen, a loft in SoHo, a few more bars in between, and ultimately, a party in Chelsea.  I was 29 and single, having recently dissolved a relationship with a boyfriend I met in South Africa.  I was on holiday and he was a Cape Town-native and we were swept up in what I thought was profound love, so much so, that we made plans to move him to New York and live together in my tiny apartment. It seemed right at the time, but once I returned to New York, I realized the relationship was a mistake.

So when I say it “dissolved,” what I really mean is that in a display of utter cowardice I just changed my outgoing answering machine message to say I would be in Berlin for several weeks without access to phones – you could really disconnect in 1995 – and didn’t answer his calls.  [I think the modern term for this is “ghosting.”] I can still hear my 80 year-old grandmother’s confused message on that machine saying, “Berlin?  For what Berlin?!” His calls were frequent that January but less so in February.  By March, the calls stopped entirely. 

So by St. Patrick’s Day, I was ready to get back in the game.  That night I wore a tartan mini-dress - I know Scottish, not Irish - with black combat boots, lots of kohl black eyeliner and a shamrock hat I lost in the first cab ride of the night.  The Chelsea party was our fourth or fifth party and the night was getting old fast.  I was about to call it quits when I saw him.  He was tall and handsome in a white shirt and blue blazer, and stood out in the haze of cigarette smoke and flashing strobes in the way a lighthouse stands out in a fog.

I grabbed an unopened wine bottle and corkscrew from the bar, and made my way toward him, not caring he was in conversation with one of my friends.  Proffering the bottle, I asked: “Can you help me open this?”  I thought the bottle opener would be a conversation opener.

But it seemed it was not to be.  With nary a glance at me, he expertly opened the bottle, never missing a beat of the conversation and handed it back to me.  My ruse was a bust. Feeling deflated, I started to walk away but then I heard him say: “You look familiar.” 

In the pantheon of first lines, this was a dud, so I almost didn’t turn back.

But I did.  I turned back.  And we talked.  About growing up in neighboring towns.  About our careers, music and travel. We continued the conversation in a cab to an Upper West Side diner and moved on to simpler topics like politics, abortion rights and religion.  A devout atheist, he nonetheless acquiesced to marry me in a Jewish ceremony and raise our future children as Jews. It was 4am when we left that diner. I saw him again the next day and the day after that. On Monday I broke up with my therapist explaining I was no longer depressed because I had met the man of my dreams.  She told me I was acting impulsively and that we needed a few sessions to close out our work. I agreed, and never kept the appointments.

I moved in with him three days after that St. Patrick’s Day party.  Oh, and at some point he told me about his previous marriage and his two daughters, his difficult divorce and previous girlfriend, his travel-heavy job and every-weekend obligation to his children.  It never gave me pause.  Never.  Me, the coward, who feigned flight to Berlin to avoid the bare minimum of entanglement, couldn’t wait to brave the messy complexity of a being a wife and stepmother. I looked forward to smoothing out the rough road ahead, like the knots I would brush from my young stepdaughters’ hair.  And for all these years later, as I write this reflection, it has been the right decision; in fact, it has been my best decision.

We got engaged on St. Patrick’s Day 1996 and married six months later, barefoot on a windy beach.  I mailed that therapist my wedding announcement when it appeared in The New York Times…passive aggression being a far more entrenched personality trait than impulsivity. Our married life has weathered breathtaking pain and enjoyed spectacular joy, more the latter than the former, but nevertheless, we have had our challenges. We added two sons to our family and have logged many hours navigating the Whack-A-Mole nature of parenting four children. But in trying to keep up and raise children we are proud of, we have become each other’s greatest ally and support one another in a way I didn’t know possible and couldn’t imagine doing without.

And so, on this and every St. Patricks’ Day, I acknowledge the holiday I happily associate with meeting my husband.  Lucky.