In the beginning

I remember when I first fell in love with Christi. We were both 18 years old and freshwomen at Mills College. She was studying music and I was studying computer science. We lived down the hall from each other in Mary Morse, the freshwoman dorm. I was dating an art major who had a nice room at the very end of the hallway. In the evenings, she liked to brew a huge cup of coffee and hold court. People would come sit around her room and we would pass the big cup of coffee around. I remember the excited way that Christi would exclaim "coffee" and how she would smile and her eyes would sparkle as the cup got passed to her. She was so funny and so enchanting. I remember telling my girlfriend one night that I hoped that Christi would come over. She said, "I don't. She drinks all the coffee!" Who could begrudge a cup of coffee to somebody's who brown eyes percolated so happily?

Christi was facinated with sound. She would walk around tapping on things, looking for new sounds for percussion. She would tap everything, lightpoles, street signs, pieces of junk. I was facinated and I started tapping thigns too. She changed the way I looked at sound. I list John Cage as one of my major influences, but really, it was John Cage through Christi. All sorts of sounds could be beautiful and could go into music. Christi so brilliant. I was convinced that she was going to be the greatest composer who ever lived (actually, I still think this). I was following her around and telling her that I would write her biography when she was famous. I remember one time, we were in one of the three places that Mills used to dump junk and she picked up some glass object and smashed it. She was looking for glass things to break. She had been a tiny bit distracted as she was combing through the junk yard, but the glass smash focussed her attention. She said, "oh! that made a nice sound! I wonder what it was?" That was the moment I fell completely in love with her.

We weren't dating (I thought christi was straight) but were spending all of our time together. A receptionist in the dorm told us we were like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb and Christi and I got into a very chivalrous argument about who was whom, each insisting that the other was definitely not Tweedle Dumb.

I had already declared to Christi that I was going to live with her after school. she was so beautiful. so smart. so talented. She had such a beuatiful smile. She was always smiling. she was the closest friend I had ever made. I was wondering at how strongly attached I felt to her and how it was odd that it was completely platonic.

One night, after several months of this, Christi told me she had a huge crush on me. So we started dating. she wasn't out, so she didn't want me to tell anyone right away, but everyone who saw my huge smile just immediately knew.

Clearly a lot has happened and changed in the nine years since then, but Christi is still the smart, enchanting, beautiful, talented person that she was then.