The Story of the Dude (The Day we Met)

My dad has worked out an arrangement for visitation with my mom. He takes each one of the three kids at separate times and does something "together".

My dad is a guy I didn't know much about or really understand at this time, but I desperately wanted a dad in my life. So I went on our outings.

We did a few random things- bowling, pizza, etc. One week, he had me and gaming at the same time, and so he took me with.

My dad was an old school strategic war-games guy at the time. He played a lot of ASL and other TSR/Avalon Hill/SSI games. He hung out with guys his age and older that played chit/grid games. They met once a week at a building at the local campus.

It just so happens that there is also a group of younger guys that play role-playing games that meet at the same time in the same building. The set up was similar to church groups- kind of grouped by age or interest, but this was for geeks.

I was not a typical geek in any standard definition. I did not like comics, not a huge fan of fantasy fiction, did not like science fiction much, and did not know the first thing about computers. My main geekery lay in a love of books. I was a bookworm at heart. I liked and did well in school.

My dad walks me around this building that smelled of chalk and bricks, introducing me to his friends and people he knows. We went through several rooms and they were all pretty much a blur. He came to a room with some people close to my age, and they were reading/discussing an extremely colorful book with flying people on it. I asked if I could hang around and see what they were up to, and I was invited to sit down.

In this room to the best of my memory was The Dude, "D" (our best man), my friend the "Yankee",and a few other guys who I'll refer to as "Flowers", "the Quaker" and "Red". There were a few other people either in the room or in the one next door that I met that night as well, but very few of them were involved in the the early years.

These strange guys with weird senses of humor started explaining what they were doing in extremely simple terms to me. They got me asking questions, and then started teaching me the rules of the game they were playing.

I was interested enough to ask my dad to bring me back again.

I can honestly tell you I did not think a whole lot of The Dude at that time. He was just some smart, geeky older guy my dad knew.

I know that first night was just the beginning of a long road to where we are now.