WHAT

A brief family history, or how Erik and Heather became Freather

WHO

Heather (née Mummery) Frederick: Native of Buffalo, NY ("a good place to be FROM") and transplanted to Durham via Rochester, NY, where she got sidetracked after college by good friends, good rivers, good dancing, and good times on her meandering path to medical school.

Erik "Fred" "Fredder" "das Fredder" Frederick: Native of Moscow (Idaho, he finally admitted), brief tenant of Michigan, New Zealand, and Finland, and predominantly from Raleigh, NC. After college, finally moved all the way to Durham for graduate school in biomedical engineering.

WHEN

September 1998, about two months into medical school, right around Gauley season but before Gross Anatomy. Noonish on a sunny day.

WHERE

The walkway between Duke South and Duke North. Heather and Jason, who met a couple weeks into med school across a crowded auditorium when the professor asked all Mac users to raise their hands, were en route to lunch. They pass by Erik, whom Jason knows well enough to greet by slamming into the fortified fence by the electric tram. "Excuse me, sir, is this man bothering you?" Heather asks a startled Erik, who responds by slamming Jason into the same fence. She turns to Jason: "Excuse me, sir, is THIS man bothering you?" Erik and Jason sort out their differences and Jason invites Erik to lunch.

HOW

Several other chance meetings occur, during which Erik acts particularly shy and barely talks to Heather, though he later admits to "playing hard to get." She becomes increasingly fascinated by this silent, Nordic frisbee player who is bewilderingly single, according to several obvious hints from Jason. One day Erik finds himself in a corner of the hospital frequented by med students (aka CTL) that is coincidentally close to the destination of his friend Rene, who is on an academic errand. He somehow runs into Heather and announces that he has bought a kayak. She immediately, spontaneously, and without any embarrassment or even conscious thought asks him out. Again, it is only after they have been married for over two years that he admits that this was not so much a coincidence as a deliberate mission. She has never actually admitted to how long she thought his name was "Fred".

And, finally,

WHY

Some things are just meant to be. Four years later Heather finally convinced Erik to marry her (or so her story goes), and it must have been love or he never would have agreed to a Buffalo wedding in December.