In April 2005, Annie walked into the backyard of a home in Pacific Heights. With a Brown University admission letter in hand and her trademark fearlessness already formed, she decided to chat with the first (and only) skinny Black kid she spotted. To this date, Landon disputes the details of this meeting, his trademark obliviousness already obvious. It would be the first of many encounters for the two over the course of the next decade. Following the apparently ineffective admit event at that backyard in SF, Landon flew off for his first year at Harvard and Annie to Penn. In May 2006, they returned to SF where they had both interned at Senator Feinstein’s district office. Landon wouldn’t forget this second encounter: he glimpsed Annie through glass doors, gesticulating wildly and talking at full volume about immigrant rights to her fellow interns. Both intimidated and inspired, he decided to befriend her/actually hid in the mailroom until Annie invited him to lunch one day. The next summer Annie worked for Sen. Feinstein on Capitol Hill, and Landon was also in DC working for Sen. Obama. Two years from then they would both end up in New York after graduation as TFA teachers. Constantly in other relationships but always friends, they watched each other’s lives weave together and apart like a figure eight for seven years. When they ended up at different Harvard graduate schools after teaching, Annie again reached out to Landon for lunch. Landon’s biggest takeaway from that lunch was that his decision not to go to law school was well founded. But it laid the foundation for a summer 2012 meet up in SF where Landon was knocked off his feet by a lighter, effervescent post-1L Annie that still contained the multitudes of a Maya Angelou poem. Now, it was Landon’s turn to fret at Annie’s obliviousness, but he waited five months to throw a Hail Mary confession of his love to her on a night that bled into the early morning in Cambridge. To his surprise, he was well received.

Remember how Annie and Landon first met? Landon set off the multi-step proposal process by emailing the Office of Admissions at Brown University to ask where they hosted their San Francisco Brown Admit event in spring 2005. With surprising ease, they informed Landon of the address and Landon mailed a letter to the owners, expecting no reply and already plotting plan B (proposal on Mauna Kea in Hawaii). The recipients of Landon's letter recently bought the home, and while they did not host the Brown Admit event in 2005 or even attend Brown, they were besotted with Landon's proposal idea. Plan A was a go! A few weeks later, Landon took Annie to their first meeting place in Pacific Heights. It was a gray, rainy day that was perfectly San Francisco, and Landon welcomed her into the backyard underneath a tent. And there, he proposed.