Last summer, my husband, Christopher, and I spent our first night alone together since our oldest child was born seven years ago. We drove two hours to Bloomsburg, where we booked a room near campus. We spent the afternoon walking around campus and the evening walking around town reminiscing about when we met.
In 1993, I was a freshman at BU. One night I got a call from a guy asking for “Jen.” I told him there was no Jen at this number. He asked what dorm I was in and if I was sure there was no Jen nearby.
We talked for a while and discovered we had a mutual acquaintance that lived in his dorm. One day when visiting this acquaintance, I met my “wrong number friend” face-to-face.
After the initial call, we talked on the phone frequently and at length, though I can’t remember what we talked about. We were not on each other’s romantic radar at the time, but enjoyed our friendly chats. We lost contact after a semester or two and he graduated in 1995.
He returned to Bloomsburg to pursue a second degree in the fall of 1997, my final semester before graduating.
One Tuesday night, we had a chance meeting in town. We talked and he tried to memorize my number (no cell phones in those days), but never called. A few weeks later, after another chance encounter and a slow dance, we walked to his apartment together to write my number in his address book.
We have now been married for 11½ years and have three children, Joshua, 7; Jackson, 4; and Molly, 2. We love taking our little ones back to Bloomsburg to reminisce about all the amazing times we had there. My husband has since admitted that there was no “Jen.” He and his friends were bored and randomly dialing numbers that night. So, it was just by chance that he dialed 3411 and heard his wife’s voice for the first time.
— Rosemary Hoban Townsend ’97
