My husband is back at Warwick City Hall. Maybe you know him by his hat – a frayed, slightly soiled tan baseball cap that he put on years ago when our sons started playing T-ball and never took off. Chances are better that you know him by his name, Peder A. Schaefer, not to get confused with his son, Peder S. Schaefer, also known as Little Peder or, to those with a tin ear, Peder the Younger.

Big Peder is Warwick’s new finance director, a job he held once upon a time, specifically, from January 1993 to August 1999. His boss then was Lincoln Chafee, who went on to become a U.S. Senator and, later, governor of Rhode Island. Peder’s new boss is Frank Picozzi, a friendly, humble and hard-working man whose old vinyl siding toolbelt hangs on his office wall to remind him of his blue-collar roots. (Chafee, a former farrier, hung a pair of horseshoes on his wall at City Hall.)

I met Peder in 1993 when I was a fledgling reporter covering Warwick City Hall for The Providence Journal. One of my first assignments was to write a story about the proposed city budget and what kind of tax increase, if any, residents could expect. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Lots of numbers in this document.

Peder: Mmm.

One of the reasons I became a newspaper reporter is that I’m not good with numbers. I flunked algebra in middle school and barely passed calculus in high school. In my early years of reporting, I managed to avoid stories involving digits, especially budget stories. But now, here I was, in the state’s second-largest city, charged with that responsibility, and I couldn’t shirk it. I panicked. I cobbled together a mediocre article, then committed the cardinal sin of reporting: I read the story back to Finance Director Peder S. Schaefer. I did this to make sure I got the facts right and to avoid an embarrassing correction on 2A of the ProJo. Peder gladly cooperated.

As my confidence improved, I relied less on Peder’s skill set and more on my calculator, as well as an editor proficient in math. Too intimidated by Peder and his sleeves-rolled-up yellow button-downs during my visits to City Hall, I never sparked up a conversation beyond, “What is an FY?” I eventually moved on to another beat, in another city, and left Peder’s orbit and his numbers-fueled documents.

Fast forward six years or so, and I’m walking to the Journal’s downtown office in Providence when I bump into Peder on the sidewalk. He asks me to go sailing. “Sure,” I say, and a few days later we are underway on the Sophie Ruth, cruising the sun-dappled waters of Narragansett Bay to somewhere.

It’s been (rounding off) 22 years of bliss: sailing, engagement, sailing, marriage, two sons, baseball, no sailing, college, sailing. And now, in a kind of time-travels-faster-than-you-think moment, Peder is working in the same place where we first met over numbers nearly three decades ago, and I’m writing a column about being married to the man who scared the bejesus out of me with his spreadsheets when I was a cub reporter.

Let’s call this fate, or maybe luck. One thing I do know is that people don’t change. A coupling is not a renovation project. Peder is still creating spreadsheets – for our household finances, this time – and I’m still requesting a translation into plain English. Someday, I’ll get my answer.