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TracyAndTom.com

The Story of Us

According to Tracy:

We met in high school. We spent a good deal of time together as friends, but it was mostly in the context of parties or big groups of friends. I remember a few things that got him off on the right foot: he brought me a veggie sub the first time I met him (this may not seem like a big deal to any of you, but for Tommy to buy a veggie anything means a lot), he brought me cheesecake, and at one point that I was feeling pretty crappy for some reason or another, he sent me the nicest email telling me how great I am. I still go back to that email sometimes, although I don't think he knows that (I guess he does now, because I'm putting it on the internet).

Throughout high school and our first year of college, we remained close friends. At the end of our first year, I decided to drive up to Cleveland and pick up Tommy from school (he went to Case Western at that point). Since I had never been to Cleveland, we decided to spend a few extra days there and he would show me the sites. Well, a "few extra days" turned into more than two weeks, and the rest is history. It was, no question, hands down, the best two weeks of my life. And it's a little hard to explain why. Love just does that to you. We did simple things like play catch and soccer, and go to art museums. But they were the best games of catch and soccer I've ever played. Our games of catch turned into wrestling, and we even got covered with fleas, but it didn't seem to matter. We ate pie at Baker's Square, bought scalped tickets for the Indians game, snuck into Cedar Point (yes I climbed a fence), accidentally lost a baseball on top of the Cleveland art museum, learned how to make pancakes (well, I learned, Tommy taught), painted a rock (more like a boulder), danced at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, played indoor tennis in the halls of his dorm, got matching "tatooes" (ask and we'll show them to you), saw the Cleveland Orchestra but had to stand in the back because we were late, and, of course, had our first kiss. We came back home different people, have been together ever since, and love each other to death.

 

According to Tommy:

We weren't really dating when I fell in love with Tracy. In fact, I don't think I even really knew that I was in love with her at the time. I was moving out of college after my freshman year at Case Western and Tracy came up to help me pack up my stuff and get it home. We had absolutely no money and I remember sitting with her and trying to figure out how we could get some cash so we could go out for dinner. We would go out at night to swing dances where we knew people so we could get in for free and at the end of the night we would try to talk our friends into letting us crash at their place. We had a car as a back-up, but finding a warm bed was never really a problem. We went to the free art museums and snuck into hotel pools and basically lived for 10 days on about 80 bucks.

We weren't really that close before she came up, but somehow we had an instant connection. I guess we both felt that we could trust each other, so there wasn't any pressure and we ended up having a fantastic time. Some of my all-time best memories occured in cleveland. I remember teaching her how to swing dance in a dried out fountain in the back of the Cleveland art museum after dark when we had the whole place to ourselves. I remember crashing at Tom Allen's house and having to get up at 300am because the world cup was on live from China or something. I remember going around to all the abandoned dorm rooms and collecting books to sell back to the book exchange for a couple of bucks and then blowing it all at Baker's Square on rhubarb pie. We snuck into the pool/spa level of the Marriott in Key Tower using some sweet MacGuiver style tricks. Then we ran back out wearing their towels while we were all wet through the 5 star restaurant in the lobby which brought on hollering and some interesting looks from the Maitre D'.

We didn't really know we were in love until much later when we were back in Cleveland for the All Balboa Weekend (that's a type of swing dancing). We were crashing on Tom's couch again and carpooling to the dances at night. We were killing time between one of the competitions and I was chasing Tracy around the hotel where the dance was when someone stopped us and said "You guys are totally in love, aren't you?" Well, we just looked at each other and decided that we must be. Yadda Yadda Yadda, and we were engaged 3 years later.