The Fall of 1982 was the best time of my Life

That was the time I met and wed my soul mate after dreaming about meeting her for eight years. I will always remember September 7th,1982 for that was the day I truly met my fate.

It all started eight years earlier when I was a high school senior. I had fallen asleep in a high school physics class. She came to me as I nodded off in class. I saw her there - the most beautiful woman in the world was standing next to me speaking a strange Asian language. I yelled out,

"Who are you?'

She merely smiled at me with love blazing from her diamond-black eyes. Then she faded away as I fell to the ground amid the laughter of my classmates and teacher.

That was the first of many dreams over the next eight years as she haunted my dreams. I knew that someday I would meet, and marry the woman of my dreams.

A few years later, I had to decide where to go in the Peace Corps. I had the dream and knew that she was in Korea, so, off I went to the Peace Corps because I knew she was there waiting for me.

I spend two years looking for her, never saw her but felt that she was there waiting for me.

I stayed on after the Peace Corps taking a job with the U.S. Army teaching ESL and basic skills to enlisted personnel. I was getting ready to return to the U.S. to go to Graduate school and was about to give notice to my employer, when I had the last dream on the morning of September 7th, the Tuesday after Labor Day.

She came to me in my dream, telling me,

"Don't worry. I will meet you soon."

That night, getting off the bus in front of me was the girl of my dreams. I looked at her and sparks flew from heart to heart as Koreans so aptly describe love at first sight.

We agreed to meet in a few days.

The next night, she was waiting for me at my base and said she needed to talk to me. I signed her onto the base and dismissed my class early. We went out to dinner and had coffee at a classical music cafe.

She told me that she had decided I was hers and that was that. I told her I felt the same way.

We meet every day for a week. My classes were in the evening. By Sunday it was clear, and I told her that it was time for us to get married. We met every day for the next few weeks. She was a college senior studying English and her English was pretty good, my Korean was not so good.

One day she told me it was time to meet her family. She had told them she wanted to marry me. She told me to bring a bottle of American whisky. I showed up with a bottle of Jack Daniels and drank it with my Father-in-Law and Uncle-in-Law. He told me it was fine with him if we wanted to get married but I had to convince his wife, her mother.

She was furious and opposed our marriage and went to a Buddhist fortune teller who told her that we had a perfect astrological combination, I was born in the year of the Goat and she was born in the year of the Pig. And he told her that the time was perfect astrologically speaking. She went and saw a different monk and was told the same thing.

We met and she told me,

"Who am I to go against the Gods?'

We got married a few weeks later at the Embassy and arranged to have our ceremony at my new employer �¢?" I took a job teaching ESL for the Korean Army at the Korean Army Consolidated Administration's new full-time language program. The job came with an apartment.

Our marriage was a media sensation. I did not know it until she told me years later, but in her clan, the old imperial family, only two people had married foreigners, the first was Syngman Rhee the first president of Korea, and then her about 40 years later.

My father, a former Undersecretary of Labor came for the wedding and ended up on all of the morning news shows as our marriage broke the stereotypes of international marriages in Korea at the time.

Over a thousand people attended the wedding, the first time a foreigner had married a Korean woman at a Korean Army base.

Thus ended the best four months of my life and the beginning of the rest of my life with her. We truly had a fairy tale romance and not a day goes by that I don't think back on how we met, and every day we fall in love again and again.