she said...

Michael and I met in what some people would consider a very unusual way :) I was traveling alot...Monday through Friday. I started playing backgammon on the net called Fibs. I met a girl there, Laila, a world class backgammon player from Denmark. I was having trouble with a player from Germany who was annoying, and I talked to Laila about the problem. She suggested I talk to this guy name Michael about tips on playing and that he was a nice person, nothing like that other German player. (I am very private and VERY leery about talking to people on the net...guess I have this impression everyone is an ax murderer).

So...a few days later I get a message from Michael asking if I needed help with backgammon...normally I would just ignore the message and delete it, especially in light of the trouble that German player was giving me...but this time I replied cause I assumed he had talked to Laila about me and that she suggested he help me. As I discovered, Laila and Michael never talked. Michael had no idea who I was when he asked if I needed help. He spontaneously said hello...apparently he regularly would help new players get started, and I just happened to be his random pick that week.

We quickly became good friends and started exchanging email. We chit chatted for quite a while and talked about the normal things people talk about when they first meet each other. From that first conversation, I knew he was a special guy and that I wanted to talk to him again. I wasn't sure how our conversation would end, so I asked him a difficult backgammon question, a question that I knew could not be easily answered briefly or in a single conversation. It was a question that I knew would spark more questions, and more conversations. (I asked him how to use the 'doubling cube'. By the way, books upon books have been written about the doubling cube and there are many opinions about how to execute it properly.)

We continued to talk by email and chatting online on Gamesgrid, another backgammon server. After 9 months we decided to meet in person on June 26, 1997, in Stowe Vermont for a backgammon tournament at the Von Trapp Family Lodge. I knew there was something more when Michael sent me his most treasured possessions, his only copy of a rare and out of print backgammon book by Magriel. Wow! That was three years ago. I honestly wouldn't have thought that I would be here in Cambridge 3 years ago. In fact my whole life is upside down due to my innocent playing of backgammon.

he said...

September 1, 1996: "Hi... you're new here, do you need any help with the backgammon server or are there any questions I can answer?" At the time I would have said I had picked Linda's name off the list of players at random, but now I'm positive it was fate.

We began talking about backgammon, but soon we were talking about the things we enjoyed, books we had read (I told her I read a lot of classics, she mentioned the title of a book she had been reading to see if I knew the author, and I did, passing that test ;) ), our jobs and careers, what we wanted out of life, etc. For a long time I assumed Linda had been asking for help about backgammon and then we discovered that we got along well. Eventually she admitted she had asked a question (about the doubling cube) that she knew would take a long time to answer. Later on I discovered that almost all of Linda's photos from growing up show her playing backgammon (even underwater)!! I think I was had by a shark, and I'm glad of it! :-)

About nine months after we met we decided to meet at a BG tourney in Stowe, had dinner together, went for an evening walk, stopped on a bridge to watch the sunset, and the rest is history.