My wife and I loved each other from the moment we met. Maybe not the kind of love that makes young couples drive to Myrtle Beach to elope the weekend they meet but a more playful kind of love that evolved over time.
And where we came from, there was a lot of room to evolve.
We met at a church retreat the summer before college. Melissa Carter had graduated from a high school across town from mine, a Charlotte private school known for its strict ethics and lily-white reputation.
My school, on the other hand, was known for football and little else. But unlike the rest of the players on my team, I was never the kind to chase girls or keep score, so to speak. I dated a few times my senior year without ever falling for anyone. The guys teased me for it. They knew I'd never gone all the way, and they were constantly trying to set me up with cheerleaders and easy girls known to have plenty of sexual experience.
But at 18, I was still a virgin and not ashamed of it.
My name is James Weldon, but my sophomoric friends all called me Well Done for some stupid reason. Well Done gets none, they would say, knowing I wouldn't get upset. They respected me because I could catch a football. And they knew I would never let them down. They also knew my dad was a cop and mother a teacher who had taught most of them along the way. They also knew my older sister Bette, who let's just say didn't have my willpower.
She'd somehow willed her way into the good graces of our high school guidance counselor though, and ended up at Duke, something my parents never understood and never were able to afford.
I, on the other hand, was headed to quiet little Campbell Baptist College on a partial football scholarship that relieved my parents and set me on a course toward a life I could've never dreamed of.
But first came bible camp, the youth retreat where I met the love of my life, sweet Melissa, who took me on a darkened dangerous ride.
She looked then as she looks now, fresh-faced, innocent, pure as the driven snow.
Mel is to this day a stunning woman, tall and tanned, athletic and sculpted from swimming and tennis her entire life, blue eyes to die for and a smile that mesmerizes men and keeps them from staring at her perfectly formed breasts.
And she knows it.
I was intimidated by her from the beginning, but for some reason she took a liking to me." Well Done," she would say, "You're the kind of young man every mother wants her daughter to marry."
She would go to school at the coast, just down the road from where I ended up, and the puppy-love affair we started in summer simmered through fall semester, two kids smitten yet an hour apart.
While I labored to stay afloat, riding the bench in football and studying the intricacies of the I-formation along with Algebra, English, Science and Biblical Studies, Melissa was at UNC By The Sea, as they call it, making A's while dragging her conservative boyfriend out of his shell through letters, voice mail, texts, sexts and frequent trips between colleges.
I lost my virginity in Wilmington the first week of school, driving back to school a changed man. I quit football after my freshman year and transferred to UNC-Melissa.
