Saturday, November 29, 1997
Fast food meeting results in love at first
sight
By RICK SMITH
San Angelo Standard-Times
MENARD - He steered his big Suburban to the burger joint parking
lot.
A few minutes later, she arrived in a Thunderbird and parked
next to him.
The two waited a few moments before leaving the safety of their
separate cars.
Oh, they knew they were in love. No doubt about that.
But the couple had never met - never laid eyes on one another
before this moment.
They were ecstatic. They were terrified.
"It was the most exciting, uncomfortable feeling,"
he remembered.
"I felt like a school kid at my first dance," she
added.
The second chapter of the courtship of the Rev. Rich Maring
and Diane Collier was about to begin.
Theirs is no ordinary love story.
Rich and Diane aren't children. They're no love-struck teen-agers.
He's 40 and has five children. She's near his age and has two
kids and a grandchild of her own.
Both have been married before. Both are divorced. Both have
known love and disappointment.
And both knew that the rendezvous under the softly glowing
marquee at Jay's Hamburgers could change their lives forever.
"We knew we loved each other - over the phone," Rich
said. "But what if we saw each other and immediately knew
it just wouldn't work?"
They made a plan, a little signal they would use to gently
tell the other person it just wasn't meant to be.
"We agreed that if one of us looked at the other and realized
it would never go anywhere, we'd just say, 'Hi, nice to meet you,'
" Rich said.
Such a safeguard was necessary, they agreed.
After all, their phone romance was just seven days old.
A mutual friend had been urging Diane to call Rich.
Diane, a home health worker in Brownwood, didn't know Rich,
who runs an outreach ministry in Rocksprings, a town 160 miles
from her home.
But the friend was persistent.
The matchmaker, who is Diane's cousin and a member of Rich's
church, "said the two of us needed to get together,"
Diane remembered.
Diane wasn't so sure.
Diane's mother had long prayed for a Godly man to sweep her
divorced daughter off her feet.
"But the last thing I wanted was to remarry," Diane
said softly. "I was finished with men."
But, for whatever reasons, she called. On a Saturday evening.
"I knew right then that he was special," she said.
"There was a sweetness to his voice. A warmth."
He called back on Sunday. And Monday. And Tuesday and Wednesday.
On Thursday, they talked long-distance for four hours.
"This is crazy," he said. "We've got to meet."
Menard is exactly halfway between Rocksprings and Brownwood.
The town, with a population of less than 2,000, has several
restaurants, but only one hamburger place - Jay's Hamburgers -
a modern, family-owned establishment that looks a little like
a Wendy's.
That's where the two agreed to meet.
Rich arrived early and nervous.
Diane drove up exactly on time, at 6 p.m.
They got out of their cars.
They walked around the back of Rich's Suburban and met for
the first time.
Diane pulled off her shades and gasped, in love at first sight.
"In an instant I knew," she said. "It was like,
boom. This is the one! Yes!"
Rich was stunned, too.
"You're the one," he thought to himself. "You!"
But, flustered, he mistakenly stammered out their agreed-upon
"no-go" code.
"Hi," he said. "Nice to meet you."
Diane's face fell.
Rich stammered, "No! I didn't mean that! Do you want some
coffee?"
Sitting inside the cafe, his hands shook so badly that his
coffee spilled.
They laughed.
"Well, what do you think?" he finally asked her.
"You first," she said.
"You're the one," Rich said.
Diane smiled, then said, "So are you."
After Jay's closed that night, they sat in the parking lot
until 4 a.m., planning their lives.
The next morning, he gathered his children and drove them to
Brownwood for church and to meet Diane and her family.
She moved to Rocksprings, to her cousin's house, the following
Sunday.
"It was like I had come home," she said.
They planned the wedding.
"I want," she said, "a wedding I will remember.
Let's get married where we met."
So Friday, a month after their first telephone conversation,
the couple met again on the parking lot of Jay's Hamburgers in
Menard.
Again, they left their cars and walked around the corner of
the Suburban and smiled at one another.
Justice of the Peace Butch Aguilar smiled, too, then led the
couple in their vows on the parking lot while friends and family
and the restaurant's staff looked on.
A few motorists, passing by on the highway, honked and shouted
encouragement.
"People think we're crazy for doing this," Rich said,
posing with Diane for wedding pictures under the Jay's Hamburger
marquee.
"Everyone tells us love doesn't work this way. But it
does."
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Copyright ©1997,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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