Since Valentine's Day is right around the corner, we asked a love-struck member of our faculty, to recount how Cupid's arrow found its mark!

Cecilia and I met on December 11, 1999. Two different friends had told me about Cecilia and thought we might like to meet each other. They told me Cecilia was in their book club, that she is Brazilian, had traveled a bit, and had been widowed for a year. One of the friends, Louise Rill, and her husband invited us to join them and another couple in attending a play at the Tallahassee Little Theater followed by wine at Café Cabernet.

We started dating steadily shortly after meeting each other. Another of my friends, Josefina Tranfa, who met Cecilia a month or two after we started dating, told me enthusiastically, "I have met the future Mrs. John Keller!" I was amused by her naive optimism. 

During the past year, many of you saw and met Cecilia at Instructional Systems events. She came with me to the spring awards ceremony in May, accompanied me to the fall wine and cheese party at Marcy's house, went with me to an HTML class sponsored by Doretta and Marie, and helped me host a fall Instructional Systems beach party at "Isle Dream," my beach house on St. George Island. We also enjoyed a back-to-school dinner party at Amy Baylor's house. Cecilia has thoroughly enjoyed meeting everyone in the program and the department.

In April and May I was Guest Professor at the University of Salzburg in Austria. I was there for three weeks and Cecilia joined me for the last two. We enjoyed the exquisitely beautiful scenery in and around Salzburg, visited Mozart's home along with many other historical sites, toured Vienna, and drove a rental car to Munich via the famous castles in Southern Bavaria. When you see Cecilia or me, feel free to ask about the blue Renault with the one-way top in the snow-covered peaks of Bavaria (went down but wouldn't go up).

We spent the summer meeting family, teaching me how to use her John Deere tractor to mow her acres of grass that surround her beautiful live oak trees, having fun cooking dinners together (especially Japanese-ish dinners at my house), ballroom dancing, and just getting better acquainted. You have to realize that for someone who has always hated yard work as much as I have, mowing all that grass was a true test of my feelings. It didn't help when she told me that before she met me, she would enhance her suntan by wearing her bikini while driving the mower. I quickly volunteered to trim tree branches or something (anything!) instead of mowing, but no dice. My job description was not negotiable by that time. Actually, piloting that self-propelled mower around was kind of fun.

Before the summer was over, I knew that Josefina's prediction was true and it was just a matter of time. On December 18, 2000, right after dinner and dancing with her in my living room to Anne Murray's "Could I Have this Dance" ("for the rest of my life…"), I proposed to my beautiful "Girl from Ipanema." Shortly after our engagement, Byunho Park and the other Korean students hosted a lovely celebration dinner for us at Mori's Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi Bar.

March 25, 2001, we will be married at the Tallahassee Garden Club and hope to see as many of our friends as would like to share this moment with us.