Worst. Date. Ever.

On Friday night I ate dinner with two of the dearest people I have ever known, the lady who preceded me as editor of our university newspaper and the gentleman who served as my managing editor. On Saturday, I found myself at a table with Jane again, but this time the gentleman on her other side was the one who had preceded her as editor.

We had plenty of catching up to do, since none of us had seen the others since we left the campus in the early 1970s. Both David and Jane were surprised to hear that I had gone to San Marcos to train to be a  journalism teacher; Jane listened to me tell the story (I could have stayed at Houston Baptist, majored in English and sociology, and gone directly to the Houston Post with a guaranteed position, which was unheard of in those days), looked almost through me, and said, "Yeah, you've always had the patience for it."

David remembered Jane's impulsive marriage during Christmas of their sophomore year that broke up while she was editor her senior year. Jane traced her somewhat haphazard history since then, which has taken her in hops across the States and to schools including seminary and social work so that she is now a counselor for military veterans. She never remarried, but she adopted a son 25 years ago that she loves dearly. I told her several times over the weekend that I wished she had come to the last reunion, but she assured me she just wasn't ready; the circumstances of her leaving had been too much for her to be ready to face coming back. I think she was pleased when I reminded her that leaving when she did opened the door for me and a lot of others who might not have had the chance to serve if she had not moved on.

David had come into the editorship in the middle of my first year on the hill. The editors before him had gotten the boot from an administration that didn't like their politics. I was surprised to find that the only story that had ever gotten out about that group had been that they published stories about the anti-Vietnam war moratoriums that were taking place on other campuses; at a school where the author of that war was an alumnus (and a former editor of the Star), anything opposing the war was considered poor taste. I hadn't known the editors well, but I had assumed the real reason for their dismissal had had something to do with other issues; a little pot in the news office wouldn't have surprised me at all.

David had been the shoo-in to replace them, and he did the job the administration wanted admirably under the circumstances that his predecessors had been run out on a stick. He fit the administration model much better than they; in fact, after graduation he  taught at the local private Baptist school. His career followed the fortuitous path that handed him a newspaper editorship: he went to graduate school, enrolled in ROTC, and wound up training with three branches of the military in preparation for a position in intelligence, he taught for a while at Loyola University, earned a doctorate at Central Florida, and he's teaching eight online sections of English now for a community college in Florida that feeds into one of the major universities, where his second wife is in administration somewhere.

David's daughter graduates this month from someplace like Auburn with a doctorate in veterinary medicine; his son just decided after 16 years of working his way up the ranks of Radio Shack and watching the movie Office Space that he could do more with his life, so he's started a new career in something like web design.

I really should have remembered more about the son because he was at the banquet with his dad. But maybe that's why I didn't remember him: David took about a half second to recognize me when he walked up to the table, hugged me warmly, and turned to introduce me—recalling exactly the worst. date. ever.

During the last few weeks of my semester as editor, David had invited me out to dinner at one of the nicer restaurants in town. I was thrilled; I was much less impressed by my own term as editor (I had been editor of the Houston Baptist newspaper when I was a freshman, and I was just in journalism school to learn how to be a journalism teacher) than I was by his. Besides, he was cute, intelligent, eligible, and altogether impressive. And I was  a mole; I probably hadn't had six "real" dates the whole time I was in college—either school.

I don't remember much about what happened leading up to dinner, but after we ate our salads and got our entrees (I recall that it was steaks; David told his son it was hamburger), David said something that made me laugh. And choke. And need a whack on the back (in days before Heimlich became the solution of note). And gag up a fine wad of meat dead into the middle of my plate.

David was ever the gentleman. He got the check, took me back to his apartment, and offered me lemonade to wash the taste out of my mouth. The rest of that evening became a blur: how could I have been such a rube as to toss my cookies on a date?

"And she was so embarrassed she never would go out with me," David told his son Saturday.

"Uh—or you never invited me!" I teased.

"Well, I—" he back-paddled.

So at least I'm pretty sure my long-term memory isn't too far gone after all: I was pretty sure that if I were anywhere in David's radar, it was as the date who gagged at dinner.

Which it was.

Worst. Date. Ever.