Fond Memories of Undergrad
Meeting my wife
I met my wife when we were both undergraduates at the University of Nevada, Reno. I can remember the exact day, largely due to the fact that it was Labor Day weekend and I was sitting in the dorm’s common area watching NFL football while waiting to meet up with a friend. I saw her walking by and asked if she wanted to watch football. She said yes, but that she had to stop by her room first. She returned about fifteen minutes later and thus began our friendship, which led to dating, which led to living together, which led to marriage and two beautiful twin daughters.
Brief aside…
That time living together with roommates before we were married was a really special time. We lived on pennies. Jody often shares a story about how strapped for money we were. One day, she was boiling water to make Ramen and one of our roommates walked up to her and said he’d give her $5 if she’d stick her tongue in the boiling water. It was clearly a joke, but she said that at the moment she considered doing it. The only thing that stopped her? She knew he didn’t have $5. The cartoon at the top of the page reminds me of those moments. We were just barely holding things together, but at least we were together.
Okay, back to the main anecdote.
One of the ways that Jody earned money was through cartooning. She drew cartoons for the school paper, and eventually started drawing a supplementary editorial cartoon (she illustrated the point being made by a columnist) for a local paper and a regular strip in the local alt-weekly.
When I met her, she was only doing the strip for the school paper. At the time, UNR’s Sagebrush had a great comics section. We had a number of cartoonists who submitted work on a regular basis, but Nicnup1 was my favorite strip. It was drawn by this person named Jody Lindke. After about two weeks of hanging out with Jody, she told me that she was going to be late coming down to hang at Denny’s because she had to finish a cartoon. It was then that she told me that she did Nicnup and it was then that I made the connection that the Jody who was my friend (we weren’t dating yet) was the Jody Lindke who drew my favorite cartoon.
It was a surreal moment. It was like meeting a closet celebrity. Here I was hanging out with the best cartoonist in the school paper, and since she eventually won the Charles M. Schulz award (sadly now discontinued) a future award winning cartoonist, and I had no idea that my favorite cartoonist and one of my favorite people were the same person. I honestly think that’s the moment I fell in love with her. Not because I’d met a local celebrity, but because of how she reacted when I told her how amazing she was.
I told her as emphatically as possible, “Really?! Nicnup is great! You are so talented.” She thought I was being sarcastic and mocking her and she asked me, “Please stop making fun of me. It takes a lot of time and effort to make those cartoons and they are special to me.” The humility struck me and I spent our entire dinner/coffee chat convincing her that I wasn’t being sarcastic, that she was my absolute favorite cartoonist. I learned so much about her in that couple of hours and I learned a lot about myself, not the least of which is that I always sound sarcastic. Especially when I’m emphasizing how much I like something. It was eye opening, and charming, and a magical moment.
Nicnup is Punkin’ backwards and Punkin’ is Jody’s mom’s nickname for her.
Undergrad is usually made up of fun and strange experiences. I met one of my comprades in undergrad when he helped me during class after I had to defend a differing opinion from the rest of the class. I brought him a coke zero later that day and we're still buds to this day.