Although I was a smoker (something that caught up with me last year, four decades after I quit, when I had to get a stent to control an aortic aneurysm), I rode home from Philadelphia in a non-smoking train car, looking for someone with whom I was going to spend time that evening. As I discovered as we approached the Haverford station and I walked toward the connection with the next car, she was riding in the smoking car hoping to encounter me.
She was apartment sitting for a faculty couple with whom both I and her family were close.
She was taking a year off between high school and college.
We had encountered one another at a train station the previous Saturday.
This was now our official first date.
I walked her to the apartment, then we walked into Bryn Mawr to a restaurant for dinner, after which I walked her back to the apartment, where I played Bach, we read some Blake and some Thomas Merton.
Perhaps we are silly in our romantic commemorations. We always remember those two days in September, the 21st when I encountered her at the Bryn Mawr train station, the 27th when we had our first official “date.”
Tooday I teach and she works.
We have been together for more than 43 years.
It has not always been easy. We both carry wounds from our earlier times, and on top of that I am a very difficult person in many ways.
We conflict in some important ways: I am a (shy) extravert, she is an introvert. I am very much a P in Myers Briggs terminology while she is a J. She is in some ways very neat while a fair degree of messiness and disorder does not necessarily bother me. I tend to be a very early morning person nowadays, while she is still a night owl.
Yet despite all that, somehow we remain together, supportive, each other’s best friend and most trusted confident.
I supported her when she did her doctoral work, she supported me when I quit a secure job with computers in local government to go off and get my teaching degree.
I quit working for a while to care for her when she got her cancer diagnosis. That became a life-changer for both of us. She took time off when I was mistakenly diagnosed as having TIAs (it was ocular migraines), and later when i had to get the stent in my aorta.
I am almost 11 years older, and when we started I was 28 and she was 17. When I tell my students this they make faces or gasp. Then I tell them that we used to think that meant when I was 100 she would only be 89 and able to care for me! Of course we expected she would outlive me. Now? We don’t know, although she has responded well to her treatment.
It is hard for me to imagine life without her. I know only that I never would have become a teacher without her support and encouragement and commitment. Had i not, my life would have had far less meaning.
It is now more than 43 years.
We still hope it is going to work out.
We still work at it.
Thank you sweetheart.
Peace.