Robert Perry was on a fake reconnaissance mission when he wandered into Tamara Taylor's emergency room looking for some "supplies."
Tamara, who was between her second and third year of medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in the summer of 1995, was in excruciating pain the day her mother drove her to St. Vincent Infirmary Medical Center in Little Rock.
"As an end of the school year treat one of my girlfriends and I went scuba diving, and I actually ruptured my eardrum and it got infected," she explains.
Robert, then a nursing student working in the hospital, didn't see Tamara when she first came into the ER, but he was alerted to her presence by a well-meaning co-worker.
He had recently gotten out of the Navy, and the nurse who checked Tamara in had been on a mission to find him a girlfriend.
"She ran to the back and said, 'Hey, this girl came in and she's really pretty. She seems intelligent. You may need to check her out,'" Robert says.
He dutifully made his way to her exam room, pretending to look for something.
"He came in the room and he was opening cabinets and opening drawers and just kind of peeking at me," Tamara says. "He finally decided to say something."
He introduced himself and asked if she was feeling better. The conversation, albeit brief, spun on from there. Before she left, he asked if he could call her sometime.
Robert's way with words may not have even been his biggest asset in Tamara's eyes.
"My mom was sitting there with me while we were waiting for my prescriptions," Tamara says. "I thought it was pretty bold of him to approach me and strike up a conversation with my mom sitting right there."
In the weeks to come, he wasn't so sure his panache had been a wise move. Tamara was living with her mother while she went to medical school, and it was her mother who answered the phone when he called a few days later.
"Her mother said she was asleep or something," Robert says. "I called again a few days later and I still didn't get her. I didn't know if she was really asleep or if her mother was making excuses or what."
He got her on the third try, and they talked for more than an hour. They had several more telephone chats over the next two weeks before going on a date. Logistics was one reason for the delay; both were busy with school, and Robert was working as well. Caution was another.
"I just wanted to get to know him a little bit better," she says.
They saw Batman and ate at Regas Grill that night. The next week they road-tripped to Magic Springs in Hot Springs.
In fall 1996, they set out on a little unexpected misadventure that ended serendipitously enough. "I got turned around," Robert says. "I couldn't find the Old Mill in North Little Rock."
"We just kept driving around and he was like, 'Oh, I was trying to find something,'" Tamara says. "We were supposed to be meeting some friends later that evening, and he was just acting really nervous and driving around and getting frustrated. Finally he just said, 'Well, I just need to talk to you,' and we just drove back to my house. He got down on one knee and asked me if I would marry him."
They exchanged vows on Dec. 20, 1997, in Mount Zion Baptist Church in Little Rock.
"Christmas is my favorite time of the year so we decided we wanted to get married at that time," Tamara says. "The church was really pretty with a lot of poinsettias and Christmas trees. It was really a beautiful setting."
The Perrys have three sons -- Peyton, 13, Parker, 10, and Preston, 8. Tamara is an associate professor with the UAMS College of Medicine and researcher at the Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute. Robert is a nurse anesthetist with Baptist Health Medical Center in Arkadelphia.
Tamara is glad he took the initiative to talk to her when she was in the emergency room all those years ago. And while Robert can't remember what supplies he pretended to need that day, he is glad his search in the exam room ended the way it did.
"I found just what I was looking for," he says.
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High Profile on 06/01/2014