Exactly 20 years ago at this moment, I know where I was and what I was doing. On a random Thursday night when The Office was just going to be a rerun anyway, I was casually showing up to a taping of CMT’s Crossroads at The Factory in Franklin, Tennessee because they needed extras in the audience. My inspiration was simply to see Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac perform in a free concert.

As soon as I showed up, amongst the hundreds of others of extras who responded to the mass email invite, from hundreds of feet away I noticed someone who I perceived as a very pretty Puerto Rican girl. She seemed like she would be fun to be around.

I have no idea what likely silly thing I said to her to get her attention, but it worked. We talked the entire time and everything else around us just faded away into a blurry background.

But I do remember having a feeling that there was a decent chance my life would never be the same.

Twenty years later, to this very day, I was right.

And to quote one of my favorite songs by Fleetwood Mac, I would now say to that same girl, who turns out to not actually be Puerto Rican:

“You make loving fun.”