The girl from Milledgeville, Georgia

Jena photographed on December 9, 1999 - Milledgeville, Ga.

"Daddy, how did you and Mommy meet?"

No, Charlie didn't ask me that. Not yet anyway. But I'm sure someday both he and his brother will come around asking about it. Maybe they'll be together when they ask it. Maybe they'll ask individually. Maybe some sort of school project will precipitate the discussion. Maybe it will come out of the blue, like when we're in line at the grocery store and Charlie reads the April 12, 2011 cover of Us Weekly: "SPEARS DENIES SHE'S PREGNANT WITH 5TH BABY."

"How did you and Mommy meet?"

Ah, I could have fun with that one. "We met at Bi-Lo." But to be fair, we are talking about their mother here. And my wife. So I'd probably not spin some false tale about the luckiest moment of my life. Instead, I would ask Sherman to set the WABAC machine to September of 1999, and hold on for dear life.

Back then, I was working for a software company in Ann Arbor, Mich. I was an installer/trainer, so I spent about half of my time on the road. I was looking forward to some travelling for R&R: a vacation in London. I was going to be meeting my parents there, but I was going to have a lot of time to myself to go exploring. It was going to be my first trip to Europe (I missed an opportunity to go six years earlier), and I was totally jonesed about going.

So you can imagine that I was a little apprehensive about travelling anywhere just before the London trip. But that's what happened - my boss came up to me and said that I was needed for three days of training in a small Georgia town called Milledgeville. As was standard procedure back then, when any of us were told we were going somewhere and it didn't sound familiar, we grabbed the nearest road atlas to look it up. *Groan*. Milledgeville was almost right in the center of the state, perhaps at least two hours drive time away from Atlanta.

What was challenging about this short-notice site was that the three days of training were, if I remember correctly, in the middle of the week - Tuesday through Thursday. I was supposed to fly out of Detroit for London the following Sunday morning. The software I was going down to install and train was a third party product, and we sometimes ran into problems because our customers didn't always know how to implement it beforehand. Also, I was coming in right on the heels of an editorial system install that was performed by one of the newer trainers.

If anything were to go wrong, or if the site extended the training for some reason (both very possible scenarios), I would be screwed. Plus, there was always the possibility of me not being able to get out of the Hartsfield Atlanta airport in time. Everything had to come together in a small window of time, or else my London trip wasn't going to happen.

The situation got a little easier when I was somehow able to change my plane ticket to fly non-stop to London from Atlanta, not Detroit. I would still be leaving on Sunday, but in the afternoon. The only downside was that I was going to have to bring all of my clothes (and my power converter) for the London trip to Milledgeville.

I flew into Atlanta on Monday night, rented a car at the airport, and made the two-hour plus drive (told ya) to Milledgeville. It was very late when I finally pulled up to the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town. I was tired, and wasn't going to be getting a lot of sleep that night because I needed to be at the Union-Recorder at 9:00 am the next morning. I went to bed to get whatever sleep I could.

The next day, I met Jena.

The Union-Recorder of Milledgeville, Ga. wasn't too far away - it was in a fairly new building with columns in a more industrial part of town. For some reason that first day the people I was supposed to meet weren't in the office yet. (Nice, I could have had more sleep). Since I had some time, I thought I would walk around the place, and maybe swing by the newsroom to see how the new editorial system was working for them.

The woman who would become my soulmate - as well as my friend, lover, girlfriend, fianceé, wife, and mother of my kids, and who would one day tell me to leave her nine months pregnant on a stranger's doorstep in the middle of the night (I didn't), and would one day cook something called edamame for me - had a corner desk in the newsroom. She was at her computer. I introduced myself and asked her how the editorial system was working. From her response, it sounded like the system was OK and that she had a pretty firm grasp on how it all worked. She had a couple questions, nothing major. It sounded like the training was a little amateurish, but served its purpose. We bantered for a little while, and I remember telling her that if she needed anything to let me know; I was going to be there for a few days.

That's how it all started. And that's pretty much how it went over the next three days, although I must be honest here and say that as time went on the bantering became more flirtatious. I casually asked some of the people I was working with what they knew about her, secretly angling to see if maybe she had a boyfriend. I found myself thinking about her more and more. I didn't have too many people to train, and there was actually another trainer from my company on-site with me at the same time - so I used this as an excuse to stay at the office late. Newsrooms being what they are, the folks who work in them often put in long, late hours. I knew that the longer I stayed at the office, the better chance I had of seeing Jena again for a minute or two and have another flit with her. It was crazy, I know, because I was only going to be in town for a few days and then, more than likely, never see her again. But I was intrigued, nay, attracted to this woman.

Who was she? Did I like her? Did she like me? Was I going to have enough time to find out?

Ultimately, the decision to change my ticket to London before I left for Georgia helped me tremendously. I got to stay in Milledgeville for a couple more days. That Friday night, a group of people from the U-R invited the other trainer and I out for the evening. Lucky for me, Jena was in the group too. We all went to watch a bit of a high school football game in a neighboring town, and then hit some bars back in Milledgeville. I rode in the car going back with her. Milledgeville, it turned out, was a pretty quaint town with some picturesque architecture and lovely antebellum homes. I didn't know this at the time, but Milledgeville was the capital of Georgia during the Civil War. Up until then I had assumed it was Atlanta, since Sherman (uh, not the same Sherman from the fourth graph) burned it to the ground. General William Tecumseh Sherman (that help?) marched on Milledgeville, but spared it - hence the beautiful houses in town.

Jena and her roommate threw a small party at their apartment on Saturday night, and I was able to go to that too. The next day, the Sunday I was supposed to drive back to Atlanta and fly to London, I had an early lunch with her at an Italian restaurant called Nicklina's. She asked me to call her when I came back through Atlanta, hinting that she would come see me before I set off on a connecting flight back to Detroit. After our lunch, I said goodbye to Jena, drove to Atlanta, and flew to London. My plane flew over Lake Sinclair, so it was easy to pick out Milledgeville. I was sad because I didn't want to leave - I wanted to spend some more time with Jena and wasn't sure if I would ever see her again.

But, as it turned out, I would be seeing a lot more of Jena. I didn't call her when I returned to Atlanta (and I still hear about that to this day), but we did start a long-distance relationship that was maintained with phone calls and email. I invited her up to Michigan for our company's Christmas party, and we took a quick side trip to Chicago while she was in the Midwest. About a week later, Jena flew to Richmond and met me there for the Millennium. Things just kept getting better and better.

"And that's how I met your mother. Now, pass Daddy the edamame."