Two encounters with the p-adic Stark conjecture

In this note we describe our personal encounters with the $p$-adic Stark conjecture. Gross describes the period between $1977$ and $1986$ when he came to formulate these conjectures (§1-8), and Dasgupta describes the period between $1998$ and $2021$, when he worked with others to finally prove them (§9-12).