Well, this was a surprise

Pedro and I had a fun surprise on Valentine’s Day. We were contacted by a reporter from Oregon’s largest newspaper, The Oregonian, about doing a story for Valentine’s Day. Her editor had asked her to track down some love stories that resulted from the sister city relationship between Ashland, Oregon and Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Pedro’s hometown and where he and I recently visited.

Janet Eastman did an Internet search and found my blog. She checked out my facebook page and found the awesome photo of Pedro and me with the macaws when we were down in the Yucatan. She messaged me on facebook and asked me to call, so I did. She said she loved the photo with the birds, and told me about her article. I talked to Pedro to get his approval, and some details. Within a couple hours, it was published.

I’m not a subscriber to the paper, other than a daily email of headlines and story summaries that I read to keep up on local news. Ms. Eastman was kind enough to send a link as soon as it was published.

She messaged me the next day to say, “Today you’re on the cover of The Oregonian,” and attached .pdfs of the story. It’s pretty cool.

I was awkward about it with Ms. Eastman at first, and told her that it’s not really my story. The actual timeline of events is that the twins’ mom was the one in the sister-city exchange program. She went to Guanajuato, they fell in love, and he went to Oregon when she had to return and finish her degree program. He told me he took some classes at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, and used the library and the gym, but was not in a degree program there. That was in 1998.

“But if that hadn’t happened, you two would not have met,” countered the reporter. And that’s true. So I agreed to work on it with her. 🙂

For accuracy’s sake, there is a mistake in the article in which the author wrote that Pedro came to Oregon to attend Southern Oregon University. He came to Oregon for his wife at the time. I think the misunderstanding is due to how I worded the story for her – trying to gracefully talk about us without getting into the complicated true story of marriage, kids, divorce, moving, and then meeting me 22 years later.

Last night, while we were cooking dinner, I received a text from one of Pedro’s sons. “Apparently you and Dad are in the news?” he wrote.

No one had told him about the article. By pure random coincidence, Andre was doing research on a paper for college on the topic of the Ashland-Guanajuato sister cities. He put in some keywords, and the top article that came back was the one with us. Andre was totally surprised to be scrolling through and found halfway down a photo of his dad and me with the birds. “Then I was confused again, because that photo is from Tulum!” he said. We got to chatting about the paper he was working on, and other things going on, he sent an old assignment for us to read for fun. He sent a video of a cool thing he saw on campus earlier in the week.

Our Valentine’s article had the side benefit of getting a teenager to have a whole entire conversation with us, which is wonderful. ❤