Our stories begin long before we do. While I was born as a child of the late seventies in Simi Valley, my roots were planted in two of the most disparate places you could ever hope to find—El Mina, Tripoli, Lebanon and Venice, California.
My father, Lee (also known as Elias in Lebanon and as Jeddo by my kids), was born and raised in an ancient Phoenician coastal town in Tripoli, Northern Lebanon, called El Mina (الميناء).
A couple of decades before my father was born, his father, Albert, had come to America and started a small business in the Southwest. Eventually, my grandfather returned to Lebanon. Back home, my great grandparents pointed out to my grandfather that he was getting older and still unmarried. They told him they knew of a young woman who he would like, but he showed little interest. My great grandparents then took out a picture of my future grandmother, Isabel. I am told that my grandfather said, “If she looks like this picture, I will marry her!”
A meeting was arranged, and my grandmother, who was in Alexandria, Egypt, at the time, came to Lebanon to meet her future husband. They were soon married. When my grandfather wanted to return to the United States, my grandparents discovered it wasn’t possible for my grandmother to join my grandfather (who had already gained his US citizenship) due to the immigration laws at the time. This was in the years leading up to World War II, so my grandfather wasn’t willing to leave my grandmother behind while he applied for her to join him in America. So, my grandparents stayed in Lebanon for many years, and in the course of that time had five children. They lost their second child, Elias, at a young age and named my father after him when he followed a few years later.
Although my grandfather returned to Lebanon and built a life there, he had seen the promise of what America could be with all of its freedom, liberty, people, and spirit. He especially saw the opportunity America offered for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit, and he wanted his children to have that opportunity. Also, there was trouble brewing between the Christian and Muslim populations in Lebanon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Christians, my father’s family found themselves in the minority, which potentially put them in danger. Since my grandfather had gained citizenship in America, there was an opportunity for my father and his brother to get their American citizenship as well. The only trick was that they had to arrive and claim their citizenship before turning nineteen.
In 1966, my father left for America at age eighteen, with his sixteen-year-old brother in tow. He had nothing except for the one hundred dollars in his pocket and a relative in Texas who offered the brothers a place to stay. My father arrived and was able to claim his citizenship. He also registered for the Selective Service, which was mandatory during the height of the Vietnam War. Although he had already received his high school equivalency degree in Lebanon, my father opted to attend a local high school to take English classes, since he only spoke Arabic and French at the time.
In retrospect, my grandfather had a lot of foresight. Thanks to his encouragement, my father and uncle were able to avoid the massive civil war in Lebanon, which began in the early seventies and lasted for the next twenty years. My father and uncle were very lucky—Lebanon was a very difficult and challenging place for young men to grow up during the civil war years.
After a short time, my father and uncle then left Texas and moved to Southern California, where my father attended a local city college under a student deferment from the Vietnam War draft. He later attended California State University, Northridge in the Los Angeles area. At this point, there were a lot of anti-war protests, particularly on college campuses. With this came a lot of flag burning. My father and many other immigrants he went to school with found themselves forming a circle around the campus flag to keep the American students from burning it. Unlike many natural-born citizens, my father and his immigrant peers understood what the world was like outside of America, and they weren’t going to let the flag be burned under their watch.
As immigrants who chose to come to America, they felt a lot of patriotism and pride. They felt it was a privilege to be part of the American dream, and they wanted to protect that idea by preserving the flag. My father told me many years after that incident that when he and the other immigrant students went back to class, the professor said, “You really took your life into your own hands with that stunt.”
My father has carried this deep and profound sense of loyalty and love of America forward throughout his life, and eventually passed it on to me and my siblings. I believe this sentiment is commonly found among immigrant communities in the United States. They can deeply understand that America is a special place that offers great opportunity and privilege to those of us who are lucky enough to live here. Immigrants like my father have seen firsthand what life in other parts of the world can be like. When my brothers and I used to lovingly make fun of my father’s accent and how he pronounced certain English words, he would jokingly reply that he was a better American than we were despite that fact that we were born here. “That’s because I chose to be an American and you had no choice in the matter,” he would tell us with a smile.
My father has never wavered in his love of America. Every night during my childhood, I was sure to find him watching the news and keeping up to date on political happenings. He genuinely cares about current events. Because I was exposed to this so young, even as a kid I understood that current events were important; after all, they were important to my father.
My father also carried with him a sense of old-world values and instilled those in me as well. “Be nice to everyone you meet on the way up,” he would often tell me, “because you will meet them again on the way down.” He would also salute, his hand low on his forehead, and tell me, “The measurement of a man is from here up.” With this, he also taught me that a handshake and my word meant something.
Today, when people ask my father where he’s from, he responds, “I’ve been here for fifty-three years. I’m from here now.”
Still, although it has now been more than fifty years since my father left Lebanon and he has only returned a few times since, the language and culture are still very much a part of his life. He often says to me, “My eighteen years in Lebanon had an equal impression on me as the fifty years since.” Lebanon’s culture, faith, and general identity all touched my father at a very impressionable point in his life, and my father has carried them forward with him. “Lebanon is a great place, with rich history, kind people, and a resilience to adversity. It is a proud place to be from,” he tells me.
My father is a man of wisdom and character. He’s a hard worker. He’s very committed to the family and to his faith. He’s an old soul who has faced a lot of adversity in his life. Despite the fact that my father has been dealt many tough hands throughout his life, he is an indomitable spirit and considers himself to be someone who landed on top. My father understands that he is rich in faith, wisdom, and love and, to him, that’s what matters most. He has the kind of wealth that no amount of money can bestow.
My mother, Juanita Susan Betzina (who is known to the world as Susan and to my kids as Teta), couldn’t have grown up more differently than my father. She was born and raised in Venice, California, as one of two children. Her father worked at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft and her mother worked at the post office. They ran a strict household with lots of guidelines in terms of what was and wasn’t acceptable. It has only recently come out that both of my mother’s parents were alcoholics, so her childhood was tough. Her father died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother, who loved us very much. When we were kids, she used to come over to our home for holidays and bring us candy and toys. We would visit her small house as well, and I recall being very scared of the clown covers she would knit for her tissue boxes! She passed away before I turned ten, but those memories are priceless.
My mother would describe herself as a “cute sixties girl.” She is five foot two and modest, but in her youth Mom was beautiful, with long hair, and very fit. She is fond of telling me about her childhood modeling days with actor and singer Roy Rogers and surfing on the Venice beach as a teenager. She has gone on to wear many different hats, including everything from working on film and projector machines at a media store to being a dental hygienist. Her older brother, John-Stephen (who I’m named after), played minor league baseball, so my mother grew up steeped in that culture. She would umpire our games when we were kids, yelling out “Strike!” or “Ball!” with great command, and arguing with any parents who dared to disagree with her call.
My mother has always had a great combination of humor and courage. Her humor is dry and witty, and she has the ability to set off a five-minute round of laughter with just a small comment or observation. I’ve always had a special connection with my mom. We tend to notice the same odd details and situations and, with just a glance at each another, can go into a laughing fit while the rest of the family looks on, totally confused.
When my father wasn’t protecting flags from being burned during his early days in America, he worked at a local grocery store. It just so happened that my mother worked there, too. My father was made fun of a lot because, in the sixties, it was rare to see a guy from the Middle East. This was at the height of the civil rights movement, so my father was pulled right into the middle of that in his earliest days in America.
My mother and father got to know each other because my mother had to do a school report on something foreign, and she picked my father as her subject matter. My father was more than happy to participate, because he had been trying to get her attention for quite some time with little success. Never one to miss out on an opportunity, he managed to turn their school report interview into a date. This whole scenario fit into my father’s overall ethos that if you put your time into something, you will receive a significant and impactful reward at the end. He was all about delayed gratification. My mother’s school report was yet another example of this.
The strict guidelines in my mother’s house extended to who she dated, and it was expected that she would date a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) American—not a foreign Arab. Luckily for my father, he’s a charmer. He was able to charm my mother’s two very red-blooded American parents into loving him. This love and sincerity washed away all of my grandparents’ preconceptions about who they expected their daughter to end up with. My father became a big part of her family’s life, and they loved him dearly.
Four kids and forty-five years later, my mother and father are still going strong.
I was a bicentennial baby, born on January 20, 1976, during the year of America’s two hundredth anniversary. I arrived as the second of four children, all of whom were baptized into the Eastern Orthodox Church. My two brothers, Ryan and Jason, and I were born in quick succession, each of us eighteen months apart on the dot. My sister, Melissa, brought up the rear ten years later. I spent the first ten years of my life in Simi Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles.
One of my earliest memories as a kid is being asked, “Why does your father talk funny?” To this day, he has a thick Middle Eastern accent. “What do you mean?” I would reply, legitimately baffled. I grew up around my aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of whom were born in Lebanon and had the same accent when speaking English. It was normal to me. My memories of these early times with my extended family are straight out of a movie scene: a room full of thick cigarette smoke with a bunch of kids running around while the adults played poker, speaking to one another in Arabic. I recall being banned from my Uncle Edward’s home on one occasion when I was about seven because I complained about the cigarette smoke. In his commanding voice, he told me it was “his house” before waving me outside, where I sat on the curb and cried for the rest of the evening.
I grew up with my all-American mother also speaking Arabic; my parents often spoke Arabic around us. Originally, my mother was supposed to teach my grandma (who I called Teta) English; instead, my grandma ended up teaching my mother Arabic—but only the use of the feminine pronouns. I recall my father telling me that he came home one day from work and heard two women speaking Arabic in the living room. When he went to investigate, he found my mother and his mother talking! My grandma never learned a word of English.
In many ways, though, I was all-American. I played football, baseball, and basketball, and ran track and field in our local public middle and high school. My life as a kid was a great balance of these all-American and Lebanese worlds.
My mother and father continued to work at grocery stores throughout my early childhood. My father worked the night shift as an assistant store manager and covered the windows of the master bedroom at home in aluminum foil to black them out so that he could sleep during the days. He blasted the air conditioner to combat the Southern California heat, while my mother shuffled us out to the park or swimming pool so he could have some peace and quiet.
On the days when my mother worked and my father was off, he would take us to go visit her. We would run behind the checkout stand to give her hugs. Likewise, sometimes she would take us to go visit our father as he worked. By that point, my parents worked at two different grocery stores, and the store my mother worked at happened to be right next to a Thrifty’s store. That worked out perfectly for us kids, because it meant we got a twenty-five cent scoop of ice cream while we were at it. Every time, we would beg for three scoops and get two. The pleasure of watching the clerk scoop out our ice cream and then running over to show our cones to my mom while she was working is such a fond memory of my early childhood.
I started off my education at a fundamental school called Hollow Hills, in Simi Valley, which was newer and located right next to our house. My parents decided they didn’t like the school, though, so they moved us to another public school called Crestview Elementary. My best friend in the neighborhood was a guy named George. He was Mexican, during a time when there weren’t a lot of Mexican immigrants like there are today. Still, there was an immigrant element to my neighborhood. George had a big camping tent, so we used to camp out in his backyard. His brother Sergio would take us to the high school, where he was an avid wrestler. His mother would cook us spicy Mexican food, and pizza with shrimp and Tabasco sauce, which I loved. She would place different food items like pumpkin seeds on her roof to dry under the hot sun, and we would eat them with very salted prunes. We spent hours in George’s backyard taking turns playing an inadvisable game we called Ninja Ladder. In this game, one of us would hold the ladder while the other tried to climb it. We would then let the ladder go to see if the climber could make it to the top before it fell over and came crashing to the ground. In retrospect, I’m shocked we didn’t break a finger or arm in the process. I really enjoyed playing at George’s house. It was ethnic in a different way than my own home, but just as natural and enjoyable.
As a kid, I spent lots of time with my brothers. In those early days, the three of us formed a very tight bond. Jason and I even elected to share a bedroom for the first ten years of our life, despite the fact that our house had an extra room for the taking. My brothers and I spent our time walking to the park, swimming in the public pool, playing arcade games at the liquor store down the street from our house, and riding our bikes all over the place. I was very curious, so I always wanted to go explore new parts of town or the large opening to the emergency sewer system across the street, which, now that I think about it, was very dangerous. Our lives were very much like the Netflix series Stranger Things, minus the whole paranormal element.
We three little Gilletts would fight off bullies together, too. We understood that we were stronger together. If someone was trying to steal our quarters at the arcade or if we encountered a bully at the park, we formed a little unit to protect ourselves.
I was always an emotional kid, very in tune with everyone around me. My mother says that I was always trying to get her or my father to hold me when I was little. If I saw an animal get hurt, I would cry. If I got pulled into the principal’s office, I would tear up. I once had a teacher who rewarded good behavior and test scores with black jelly beans. If you didn’t do well, you were offered a colored jelly bean, instead. Any time she opened up the colored jelly bean jar for me, I was devastated.
I felt every emotion to the fullest degree. Whenever I was part of a school play or presentation at school, I was so proud of my role or costume that I could hardly contain that pride. I would spend hours making my costume just so, and stand up nice and straight to show it off. As far as I was concerned, life was pretty close to perfect.
We were doing fine in Simi Valley. As far as I could tell, there was never any financial distress or anything like that. I certainly never got the hint that we were under any sort of financial pressure. We were just your typical middle-class family with parents who worked a lot of hours. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood the toll our lifestyle had taken on my parents. The cost of living was high in Southern California, the hours my father worked were unsustainable, and it was a lot of stress for my mother to raise three kids while also working.
There was also the fact that, by this point in the eighties, gangs were starting to creep into the Greater Los Angeles area, and the neighborhoods were changing dramatically. While the San Fernando Valley, where we lived was still relatively safe, my father didn’t want his three boys to be raised in that type of environment. When I was in fifth grade, my parents decided it was time to search for greener pastures where they could lead a more balanced lifestyle. They had good memories of a camping trip we took in Oregon, so it was decided that was the spot. I was very sad to have to leave my school and friends and especially my childhood crush, Lindsey. Looking for a way to soothe my broken little heart, I asked my father if I could drive up to Oregon with him to help find a house for our family to rent.
My father had planned on going alone, but I was adamant, and my brothers didn’t care, so off Dad and I went, driving thirteen hours to find our new home in Eugene, Oregon. The drive was beautiful. In contrast to the dry, brown Southern California landscape I was used to, it was all trees and rivers in Oregon. There was a palpable sense of abundance and cleanliness. As we drove the up Interstate 5, Dad and I happened to see a rainbow. From the way it was angled, it felt like we were actually going to pass under it. “Wow! This is cool!” I exclaimed.
“Do you know what this rainbow means, Stephen?” my father asked. I shook my head, no. “It’s good luck,” he told me. “It means we’re being blessed.”
Once Dad and I arrived in Eugene, we purchased a newspaper and drove around town looking for rentals. As I peered out the window, I spotted a sign on a garage that read, “For Rent.” The home was in the Peppertree neighborhood, right across the street from Churchill High School. To this day, my father gives me credit for finding our family’s first home in Oregon.
We returned to Simi Valley, hired a moving company to pack up our house, and, with that, the next chapter of my childhood began. To me, it all felt like an adventure.
We arrived in Oregon in 1986 as a family of six: my father, mother, brothers, newborn sister, and myself. I was ten years old at the time.
My parents made it their goal to change their lifestyle. They didn’t want to find what amounted to “just another job.” They wanted to become small business owners. So, they hired a broker to help them find businesses that were for sale. They looked at several different retail concepts until they discovered a burger joint called Rainbow Mountain Restaurant, located on the interstate freeway right at the edge of town. My parents fell in love with the restaurant, so they met the owners, put down the money they had stashed away from selling our house in Simi Valley as a deposit, and made a deal to lease the business from the owners. We kids couldn’t have been any happier—our family now owned a place that was full of burgers, french fries, milkshakes, and ice cream. Plus, there were arcade games in the lobby, which my mother would play with me. Our favorite was a game called Tempest. I don’t think I ever once beat her at it.
My parents put their heart and soul into that restaurant, and so did I. In fact, it turned out to be a defining period in my life. On the weekends I helped them clean, and did whatever was necessary to help the business grow and thrive. I understood that the business we were creating was very meaningful to my family, and I wanted to do anything I could to contribute to it.
My parents explained to me how the business worked, and I loved going with my father to buy supplies. Of my siblings, I was the one kid who was willing to wake up before I had to in order to tag along and help shop for what was needed to stock the restaurant at the local supply warehouse. Because I joined in on purchasing, I witnessed firsthand the type of money my father spent on all of these supplies—thousands of dollars!
At just twelve years old, I felt really connected to the economics of the store, although I never would have put it that way at the time. I just considered myself aware. I was reluctant to put extra ketchup on my burger when I ate lunch at the restaurant or to put four pieces of chicken in the deep fryer when I could be perfectly satisfied with three. Every time we considered hiring an employee for a job I knew I could do myself, I would just try to take on that task. I began to understand that the more effort we put into the restaurant, the more we got out of it. What I was also beginning to understand, without even realizing it, is the basic mechanics of how revenue, costs, profit, and labor all work together in a business environment.
Before long, we made that restaurant a success; way more successful than it had been in the years prior when the previous owners had been running it. It was mainly my parents, myself, and about three employees putting in all of the elbow grease, and all of our hard work was paying off. My family moved up to a nice house on the hill, my parents bought new cars, and for those first few years in Oregon, we were thriving.
Little did we know that all of our success would ultimately work to our detriment.
The restaurant’s previous owners noticed that we had lines out the door and the restaurant was booming. They began to understand that Rainbow Mountain was way more successful and generally better than it had been when they were at the helm. Unfortunately, this made them act nefariously.
My father assumes everyone shares his old-world ethics. He assumes everyone takes a handshake and their word as seriously as he does. After all, the previous owners had invited my parents over for dinner before sealing the deal, and they talked about their shared Christian values. To my father, these were sure signs of the family’s moral aptitude. What my father hadn’t understood was the strong and complicated contractual language within the deal, which essentially stated that, given time and a certain set of conditions, the owner could seize the restaurant back from my parents.
One of those conditions was that the owner must have the monthly lease payment from my parents in hand by the second day of every month. If it was more than four days late for two months in a row, it could be grounds for repossession of the rights to the restaurant. Every month for years, my father hand-delivered the monthly lease check and shook the owner’s hand, because that’s what he did.
It was hard to catch my parents in a late payment clause, because they were never late. So, in 1991, the owner orchestrated a set of conditions that forced the check to be late: he took vacations, changed his phone number, and even moved without telling us. As a result, my father was penalized because he couldn’t manage to get the check to the owner within the grace period two months in a row. My father was not savvy about certified mail and other legal protections, because he was trusting and always gave people the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, that worked to his detriment. The minute the owner was able to orchestrate two late payments, he took my parents to court to activate the contract’s clause and repossess the restaurant.
My father hired a lawyer and the case went to pre-trial. The lawyer and judge pulled my parents aside and told them they had thoroughly exhausted the review of the contract’s clause. They admitted that what the owner was doing wasn’t nice, but warned my parents that, nonetheless, he would inevitably win the case in the long run. My parents were told they had two options: to fight and delay the repossession or to give back the restaurant.
I have very distinct memories of a couple years filled with very emotional fights with the owners. In the final days of the restaurant, we didn’t make a lot of money because there were a lot of legal and accounting fees to pay off and a family to support. We tried to fight the looming financial tide, but there was only so much we could do. My parents decided to open the restaurant for breakfast in order to get more people in, and I was there helping in the mornings before school when I could. I would try to work every day after school as well, so my parents didn’t have to hire people.
Finally, the day I turned sixteen, I applied and got a job at Albertsons, a grocery store down the hill from the restaurant. “Look,” I told the hiring manager, “I’m not your average sixteen-year-old. I’m not just here to make extra cash. I really need this job.” I got a job as a courtesy clerk working in the back of the store, making five dollars per hour, and putting in between thirty and forty hours every week, while still in high school. I handed most of every paycheck over to my parents to help with groceries, gas, and the supplies they needed to keep the restaurant running. Mind you, I was only making about one hundred dollars a week after taxes, so, sure, it was a nice gesture—but it didn’t go very far.
It was an awkward balance, trying to be a kid, but also knowing that every dollar I could get to my parents and every hour I could work would help them fight to keep the restaurant. I was constantly focused on three things: survival, school, and helping my mother and father. It was emotionally devastating, and, in the end, all I could really do was stand by and watch as everything my family had worked for collapsed around us. My grades suffered in the process, and it got to the point where my family didn’t have enough money for me to play sports, so the coaches pitched in so that I could get gear and attend football camp at the program the University of Oregon had for high schoolers. I was lucky; being one of the fastest and strongest kids in school as well as a star football player inoculated me from being bullied about my situation. In addition to our own pain, it was also painful for our community to see our business and family collapse.
One day when I was sixteen years old, we closed the restaurant at 8:00 p.m., left the keys in an envelope in the back, and walked away from everything. We went home and, suddenly, no one in the family was employed. My parents had not saved much because they didn’t plan ahead for this type of scenario.
One thing I was certain of, however. I never again in my life wanted to be in a situation where I could be taken advantage of. Never again did I want my family and myself to be put through such distress.
All of a sudden, life looked very different. My parents were hurting. We lost our home and had to move to the poor part of the city, far away. At one point, my father even considered moving us into a trailer. The cars were repossessed in the middle of the night. We had spent years helping to build a Greek Orthodox church in Eugene (pitching in by excavating wheelbarrows full of rock, prepping the soil, and working the Greek Festival to help earn money for the build-out), and the priest who ran the church, Father John, generously loaned my family a small car so we could get around. We went on government assistance. My mother used to put the government-issued powdered milk into a regular milk jug to try to fool us into thinking we were drinking real milk. It didn’t work; instead, the milk served as a constant reminder of how much things had changed for us. It was all very demoralizing for my family and, especially, for my parents.
Despite all of this, our family was intact. We were together and we loved each other. But, still, as a teenager, it was traumatic, and I was humiliated and embarrassed. I’m sure my father was, too. He was in his late forties at that point, and no one wanted to hire him. One day, after several failed attempts to find a job, he came out to my football practice. “I got a job at the grocery store,” he told me.
I was angry and frustrated. Everyone in town knew who we used to be, and now they would see my father working in the produce department at the same grocery store where I worked. “I’m already humiliated that we lost everything, and now you’re going to work for minimum wage with me?” I couldn’t believe that, after all of this, he was going back to the exact same job he had in California.
Ultimately, that’s exactly what my parents did. They replicated the lives we had lived in California for the remainder of their working years: an honest and lower-middle-class life spent working at grocery stores. It wasn’t until I was older and successful enough to intervene that things changed.
Today, what was formerly Rainbow Mountain Restaurant is a gas station. My own family drives by it every year on our way to visit my parents in Eugene. I often think about buying that restaurant back and turning it back into the Rainbow I once knew and loved. It is a symbol of a childhood that, while full of love and support, also included great challenges and many difficulties. I deeply believe those young and impressionable years shaped me for life in so many ways that were not apparent to me at the time.
Little did I know that just as I was going through my bout of bad luck as a teenager, so was the girl I would one day marry, Aisha Schmitt.
Aisha had grown up in Northern California, in the North Bay community of Rohnert Park in Sonoma County, and spent her summers at her grandmother’s interstate Totem Motel in Crescent City, California. Aisha’s mother Marjorie, gave birth to Aisha when she was just nineteen years old, following a fleeting relationship with Aisha’s biological father in the late 1970s. Aisha’s biological father, Thomas, was an Army helicopter pilot who, after surviving several tours in Vietnam, died in a civilian helicopter crash in Utah in the early 1980s, when Aisha was a young child. She never met Thomas.
Aisha’s adopted father ,Robert, worked for the regional utility company as an engineer; her mother was a bookkeeper at the local grocery store. Aisha was the oldest of five children from a mixed marriage family. She had twin sisters, Elan and Deserae, and two younger brothers, Brenton and Logan. Aisha’s family moved to Eugene when she was fifteen. A year later, she got into a fender bender while she was leaving the YMCA in her father’s Honda Accord. Her mother decided to teach Aisha a lesson by having her get a job to pay for the $400 deductible.
This is how Aisha and I ended up working at Albertsons together—but I didn’t know that for a while.
My father met my future wife before I did. “Do you know what your name means in Arabic?” my father asked Aisha as his eyes landed on her name tag.
Aisha told him she did not.
“It means alive,” my father told her.
This began a conversation between the two of them. As they talked, my father couldn’t help but think that Aisha reminded him of the women he used to know from the old country. She was smart and modest. It made him wish that someday my brothers and I would find women just like Aisha. “I met a wonderful young woman at the store today, the type of girl I’ve always wanted my sons to marry,” my father told me when he got home one evening.
Little did I know how eerily accurate his take on Aisha was.
Several weeks later, I was sitting in an upstairs room at the front of the store, which overlooked the checkout lanes. Through the one-way glass that we used to watch for shoplifters and monitor the store’s front-end operations, I could see all the customers and store personnel working. Another guy up there with me pointed down toward the floor. “Hey, look at the new girl,” he said.
“Oh, I’ll talk to her the next time I see her,” I thought innocently.
It didn’t take long before Aisha and I began courting in the grocery store, just like my parents had decades earlier—although I only realized this similarity in retrospect. At the time, I didn’t really understand what was happening. It never occurred to me that Aisha (who worked in the front of the store) was personally delivering beer bottles and soda cans to the back room where I organized and recycled them for anything more than a love of recycling.
I was a completely oblivious seventeen-year-old boy. One time I made an offhand comment that Aisha should tuck in the white button-up shirt that she wore under her blue Albertson’s apron like the rest of us did. “You would look so much better,” I said. I couldn’t help but think what a coincidence it was when I noticed Aisha’s shirt was tucked in a couple of hours later.
One day, Aisha brought her mother to the back of the store to meet me. Her mother grabbed my arm (almost as if implying I was “good stock”), said hello to me, and then quickly walked away. “Well, that was weird,” I thought.
And I certainly had no idea I was wooing my future wife when I found a smashed grape next to one of the industrial black doors that swung open from the produce department in the back of the store. I laughed to myself as I took out a black marker and wrote “Ian” on the ground, with an arrow pointing to the grape. Ian was a little guy we worked with. She didn’t tell me at the time, but Aisha saw my smashed-Ian-grape and thought it was hilarious, too. “That’s when I knew I really liked your personality,” she later confided.
I soon learned that Aisha and I both attended the same South Eugene high school. Before long, we started hanging out at school all of the time, too. After a while, people began to notice Aisha and I were together a lot. “What’s going on? Are you guys together?” my friends would ask. But we really weren’t. Aisha was just my friend. Kind of.
By December 1993, our senior year, the two of us had been working and hanging out together for more than a year. One evening, some members of the football team were out for an off-season run, and we happened to pass by Aisha’s house. “Hey, guys. I’m going to take a quick detour,” I told my teammates, as I cut across her lawn. I ran straight up to the front door, and Aisha answered.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “You’re all sweaty and nasty!”
“I’m running with the team, but I just want you to answer one question,” I told her, still out of breath. “What do I tell these guys the next time they ask if we’re going out?”
“Tell them yes,” she said, immediately shutting the door in my face.
We’ve been together ever since.