Month: February 2021

My wife and I are celebrating twenty-five years together this winter.  God, that’s three impeachments ago.  To place it in even more sobering perspective, the January morning we’d met for our first date at the AMC on Third Avenue at 86^th Street, I’d never in my life sent an e-mail.  At best, I had peripheral awareness of the “World Wide Web”—whatever that was—and certainly no idea how to access it (not that I’d ever need to).  I definitely didn’t have a cell phone—which, admittedly, would’ve come in handy, seeing how I was running late to meet her.

But we met that morning just the same; in those days—don’t ask me how, for this secret, like the whereabouts of Cleopatra’s tomb, is permanently lost to history—folks somehow met up at a prearranged location without real-time text updates.  It’s true.  We met many more times over the month that followed, in many more locales around the city:  Theodore Roosevelt Park on the Upper West Side; Washington Square Park in the Village.  (Public parks are a godsend for penniless students at commuter college.)  It was cold as hell that winter, but I never cared; I was happy to sit outside in the bitter temperatures for hours—and we did—just to be with her.  By February, we were officially inseparable—and have remained so ever since.

A lifetime has passed since then, one in which, hand in hand, we’ve graduated college, traveled to Europe on several occasions, moved across the country (on September 11, 2001 of all cosmic dates), weathered the deaths of a parent apiece, eloped in Vegas, cared for twenty-four different pets (mostly fosters), consciously practiced patience with and developed deeper appreciation for one another during this indefinite interval of self-quarantine (we haven’t seen our immediate family on the East Coast since Thanksgiving of 2019), and have perennially quoted lines from GoodFellas to one another… because, well, GoodFellas might be the only thing that’s aged as well as we have.

She’s certainly aged preternaturally well in her own right.  She was the prettiest girl at school—no minor triumph, given that there were almost 20,000 students at Hunter College at the time—but she’s impossibly more beautiful today.  When I glance in the mirror, however, I in no way recognize the kid that fell in love with her all those years ago.  This is a good thing.  I think—I hope—I’m a much better man today than I was then.  Kinder; more compassionate; more sensitive; more patient.  Certainly wiser.  And hopefully more deserving of the love she’s given so freely and steadfastly.  Indeed, hopefully that above all else.

All the best ideas to grace my life over the past quarter century have been hers, without so much as a lone exception.  Long before I took up blogging, she’d encouraged me to do so.  I was such an incorrigible Luddite, however; furthermore, I reasoned it would be a distraction from my “real” work:  screenwriting.  Now I wish I’d swapped screenwriting for blogging years earlier.  The former—my bright idea—made me miserable; the latter has allowed me to better know myself unquantifiably.  I am an exponentially better writer for this continuing project—the one she had the wisdom to suggest years before I could see the value in it myself.  She didn’t hold that against me, though; she even set up my WordPress domain.  Now you get to read all about the esoteric bullshit she alone used to entertain over dinner.