How I Met "How I Met Your Mother"

 

Kids, I'm gonna tell you an incredible story. The story of how I met "How I Met Your Mother."

It was the summer of 2012. Barack Obama was a few months away from re-election for a second term as President. Marvel's The Avengers was on its way to becoming the third highest grossing movie of all-time. YouTube was about to contaminate the internet with the music video for Gangnam Style which, to date, is the most-watched clip in its history.

And just a few months earlier, a show described in its Netflix bio as "Ted's epic search for his soul mate told largely through flashbacks, as an adult Ted recounts to his kids how he met their mother," had just wrapped up its seventh season. As the self-proclaimed melancholic sap that I am, this show had me at the words "epic" and "soul mate." And being a fan of any non-linear style of story-telling and of well-crafted scripts using flashbacks to tell their tales, I was instantly hooked. So how did this gem of a show stay hidden from me for 160 episodes?

For you, Grandma . . .

Typically, during the workweek, my morning slumber is interrupted abruptly by the soothing sounds of MC Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock on my iPhone alarm clock. But at 6:15 on the morning of Tuesday May 29, 2012, when I was awoken by the ringtone assigned to my mother's phone number, I knew what the purpose of the call was before I had even opened my eyes.

Just a day earlier, on Memorial Day, I had decided to take advantage of the extra time off from work by enjoying a mid-morning workout at the gym. While there, I missed a phone call from my sister and, as I am not in the habit of receiving casual, "Just seeing how things are going," phone calls, I was quick to return it in the chance that there had been some sort of an emergency.

How I Met My Mother

For eight television seasons, Bob Saget has narrated the story of five friends in their late twenties and early thirties living in New York city. At the center of this story is a hopeless romantic bachelor in a search for "the one." As it is being told to his two children with the advantage of hindsight through a series of flashbacks, we know everything about the outcome of this fairy tale except for who their mother is.

While there are some similarities between myself and the Ted Mosby character, the one obvious difference is that I currently do not have children of my own to tell the story of how I met their mother. I can, however, tell the story of how I met MY mother.