My Squid - Part 1

This week is special. It's Ranger Week! Let's get the subject of nicknames out of the way before I go any further.

When I first met James Ryan Ewing, he was working on the grill at Pita Pit. Mallory called over to him from the register, "Hey Ranger, come here, I want you to meet someone." So to me, he was Ranger. A year went by and we didn't see each other, and after Mal married and moved to NJ, I didn't hear about him or talk about him. So when I went in for a pita a year later, I said, "Ranger, right?" and he said, "Yeah. Megan, right?" So those were our names. My receipt said Host: Ranger. So clearly, that was his name!

Then we became Facebook friends, and I discovered his name is really JR Ewing. But some people called him Ryan on his wall (I'm past the point of pretending I didn't do a little stalking in the early days!). So I just went with what I first knew him as, and continued to call him Ranger. He said he liked it, and I did to.

But then as the relationship progressed and I talked about him to friends and family, the questions came. "Ranger? That's his name?" or "Wait... The dog's Norman and your boyfriend's Ranger, or the other way around?" So then I had to explain that he got the name Ranger when he created his first e-mail address. His family used to call him Ryno, and he liked Nolan Ryan from the Rangers, so his first e-mail address was rynoranger@juno.com. So people somehow started calling him Ranger and it stuck.

Then they'd ask, "Do you call him Ryan or Ranger? Do you feel weird calling him Ranger? Other people call him Ryan... but you call him Ranger?" So then I DID kind of feel weird calling him Ranger, but I felt even more weird starting to call him Ryan or JR when that's not how I met and got to know him.

So I was never really comfortable calling him anything, when one day I called him Ranger Cake. That lasted a few days, then the Ranger part dropped, and it was just Cake. Eventually the same thing happened and the shortened progression is this: Cake Diddly, Cake Diddly Squiddly, Diddly Squiddly, Squidda, Squid.

So here's to the beginning of a few days of posts in honor of my LOML, my Squid.