KNOWvember Day Twenty-Two: Gerry and Victoria

We met by accident. Or I guess I should say we met because of an accident. It seems an overly zealous or ambitious Uber driver flew through a stop sign and shot accross a street without stopping for oncoming cars.

Gerry, being on a street bike, was not able to run through this guy’s car. Instead he hit it and then flew over it. I didn’t see the accident happen. But as it happens in life, I was on my bike when I saw the opportunity to make sure everyone was okay before I rode  home.

But once I got inside I realized that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to meet Jerry, and his girlfriend Victoria who came to his rescue.

​Two new people on the 22nd it was destiny. And Gerry and Victoria know a little something about that.

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Both are born and raised in different neighborhoods of L.A. Both have immigrant parents. And both social workers. Victoria works for a family clinic and Gerry, after 30 years of doing family and child advocacy work, teaches field classes at UCLA where he is a Bruins alumni. She is USC Trojan. The two biggest rivals on the West Coast, yet they make that work. At least until tomorrow when their respective schools will battle it out in the gridiron. 
 
Ironically, the two of them met by accident as well. A much happier accident than the one today. First of all, they like to tell people they met when Victoria put an ad on Craig’s List Personals looking for “some arm candy” to take to a wedding she didn’t want to attend alone. Gerry was that guy. 
 
The real story is they met at a work conference in downtown Los Angeles. She was living and working in New York, which meant that they had a long-distance relationship for the first of the three years they have been together. They would FaceTime daily, but also kept and sent one another journal entries that they wrote. Super cute!   
 
Their real, real story is even better than the first two simply because it happened a year before they ever met. Victoria, who was on the social workers cycling team at USC, was getting ready to do a charity ride. One of her team members asked her if she would pin a photo of his dear friend who had just passed away to the back of his jersey. Victoria obliged and then spent the rest of the ride staring at that man wondering who he was. 
 
Well, as happy accidents tend to work out, that man just so happened to be Gerry’s dad. She would not know it until they were already dating. “Seems like my dad wanted us to meet.” 
 
I doubt his dad wanted him to meet the back of that car, but I am glad he did. As Victoria said, “This put a happy ending on an unhappy event.” I would agree.