On how I married Opie

Andy and I own seasons one through five of The Office. We don't own season six, because it isn't out yet.

Yeah, we love it.

One day we were talking about it with Roommate and he confessed that he'd never really watched the show and didn't know much about it. Right then and there I decided he needed to know and we've been subjecting him to marathons of The Office for a few weeks now. Good thing he likes it.

Anyway, in one of the episodes Pam is looking through one of Jim's old high school year books and she, of course, comes across his picture. The picture in question is bad and awkward, like all yearbook pictures and Pam makes fun of him a little bit for it.

While I was watching this scene I was reminded of a page out of  my own courtship with Andy.

Andy and I met when we were 17 and still in high school, but we went to different schools.

Julie's mom was a teacher at Andy's school and a favorite pastime for Julie and I was to look through the rival school's year book.

In 1998, a little less than two years before I met Andy, we did just that. We spent a lot of time pouring over the pictures of that "other" yearbook. We knew everyone in ours and it wasn't nearly as much fun to look through.

Julie and I would look through all the class pictures to see if we knew anyone or to make fun of the bad photos.

We were looking through the freshmen class pictures when we came across this one guy. It wasn't a bad picture, but he kind of had a funny little smirk on his face and even though the picture was in black and white the boy in question was obviously a red head. There was just something about the picture. I laughed and said, "Look Julie! This guy kind of looks like Opie!" We had a good laugh and moved on.

Eventually the yearbook lost it's appeal and we forgot all about it and moved on to bigger and better shenanigans.

Fast forward two years.

Andy and I had been dating for a couple of months. We had gone to each other's proms and were moving along nicely in our little romance.

Then one day I was over at Julie's and we were bored and she said, "Hey! We should look at Mom's old yearbooks and find Andy's pictures." I was game, so she took the books off the shelf and we started riffling through them. We looked up Andy's name in the index and found all the pages he was listed. After all the club and sports photos we came to the individual class pictures.

Julie flipped open the page and it only took a second to find him. It all came flooding back to my memory as if it had just happened. I saw the picture and I knew. "Oh my God! I'm dating Opie!"

It took a second, but everything clicked for Julie too. I was dating the guy in the picture that we'd laughed at two years before.

We laughed at it again. It really is funny and I still can't look through that book without laughing. As soon as I saw Andy after my recovery I told him all about it. He didn't think it was very funny. He still doesn't.


The truth is that Andy really doesn't look anything like Ron Howard, past or present. The only time I've ever thought he did was in that picture.

But that doesn't mean I don't tease him about it whenever the opportunity arises.