Attitude of Gratitude for 2017 – December 9, 2017 – The Pioli’s
I met these two 33 years ago. We’ve gone through much of our incredible adult lives together. I’m so lucky they are such a huge part of my world.
Last year my good friends Dave and Mary Jane Pioli threw my double nickel birthday party. I’ve had the wonderful good fortune to have met these two souls in 1984 when I was stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. We have moved through our adult lives together. These two took the huge leap and moved away from their families to pursue their dreams in the Pacific Northwest. They did a post card campaign to my husband and I to entice us to move there as well. We followed a year later.
Dave and Mary Jane had a zest for exploring the Pacific Northwest and often cajoled my husband and I into going camping during some pretty gruesome storms. One weekend in January back in 1989, we went camping on the Washington Coast. We had taken our Nissan mini-van with our three dogs. The last morning in a down pour, Dave successfully lobbied us to leave early to go to breakfast. It really wasn’t very hard to convince any of us to go along with this idea. On the way out of the campground, we hit black ice and the mini van went off the road and rolled down a hill. No one was hurt. Oddly enough, the only thing that went flying out of the Mini-van was Mary Jane’s birth control pills. Dave in surveying the scene found them perched on a shrub about 50 feet from the upside down van.
The mini-van was totalled and too damaged to drive back to Seattle. Dave, Mary Jane and my husband found a bar to watch football while I found my way to the closest town to get a rental car so we could get back to Seattle That was a very crowded trip with the four of us, our camping gear, and the three dogs in this tiny rental car. We were quite grateful though to even have a way home.
Two months after this accident, Mary Jane picked me up at the airport on the way home from a business trip. The first thing I said to her – I feel like I’m going to toss my lunch. I think I might be pregnant. Even though Mary Jane was the one who lost her birth control pills in the accident, I lost something else, my inhibition with having children. While my husband and I were not trying to have children, we also were willing to start a family in several years. We had actually discussed this the night before we rolled the mini-van. We just had no idea it would happen so fast.
For the duration of the pregnancy, I said I was pregnant because of Dave. It was his desire to go out for breakfast that started the whole situation that lead to the start of our family. My husband and I had been very successful in preventing pregnancy as I had a very routine cycle. But the accident changed all that. It threw off my cycle. A power outage after a couple glasses of red wine several weeks later, during a time when I thought it would be safe not to use any “protection” – brought our new daughter into being. Dave thought this was the craziest assertion. Yet it was hard to refute the validity of this story when she was born on his birthday.
Dave and Mary Jane have been in my life in so many helpful and profound ways the past 33 years. They have known me every step of my entrepreneur’s journey. They believed in me when I did not even believe in myself. I am very fortunate to have the love and friendship of these two very special souls.
