It's funny how certain dates stick in your mind.

I'm not talking about birthdays, or wedding anniversaries, or things like that. I'm talking about dates on which something relatively insignificant happens that turns out to be the beginning of something a lot more significant. For example, my first date with my wife Nicole was on Sept. 12, 1992, and that led to our wedding on Nov. 2, 1992. The wedding anniversary is the one that is celebrated, but the earlier date is remembered fondly.

I had another anniversary to remember in earlier years, but my first marriage was celebrated on the same day of the year as Waco (1993) and the Oklahoma City bombing (1995). It could have been worse. If we had been married one day later, we would have shared our anniversary date with Adolf Hitler's birth (1889) and the Columbine school shootings (1999).

It's odd -- maybe because the marriage failed -- but I remember the wedding anniversary a lot less fondly than I remember the first date.

Of course it was on Sept. 29.

With one exception, all the relationships with women that mattered to me started in the last four months of the year. The one outlier started on Lincoln's birthday in 1980 and lasted longer than any others except my marriages.

The thing I find funny about Sept. 29, 1973, isn't what it turned into. I think I've written before that if I knew how it would play out, I might have done things very differently. It's just that what I did was so unlike me.

I was 23, and I hadn't been dating anyone regularly for more than a year. Most of the time I went out, it was to the bars of Washington, D.C., with friends. On this night, none of my friends were available and I was drinking alone at the Crazy Horse in Georgetown. At about 10:30 p.m., after four or five drinks (weak ones), I decided I would call her and see if she wanted to have a drink with me.

We had never gone out. She had been dating one of my friends a year or so earlier, and I had been attracted to her.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/agraf.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1392" title="agraf" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/agraf-212x300.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="300" /></a>I certainly wasn't expecting her to be at home on a Saturday night, but she was. I asked. She accepted. We actually wound up going to a midnight showing of "American Graffiti," and then for a drink afterward.

We dated for the next seven months -- a few bad times but mostly good ones -- then got engaged and married a year later.

One reason I remember that night so fondly is that I was not at all confident in the dating scene. The idea of calling someone late on a Saturday night probably would never have occurred to me without the help of a few drinks.

As I said earlier, I was 23, and maybe the strangest part of it all as I look back 38 years into the past is that in some ways I can hardly imagine being that person, and in other ways I am still that person. I remember asking my mother once when you start to<em> feel</em> older, and she said in some ways you never do. She told me that inside, she still felt like the same person she was when she was 16.

I found that oddly comforting.

In a little over two months, I will be eligible to start collecting Social Security.

But even when I do, a part of me will still be 23.

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