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| Regina Holliday's Walking Gallery Painting: "Love is an Ever-Fixed Mark" |
We've talked of doing this for many months and I finally got our jackets to Reggie as our paths crossed (through a helpful hotel concierge) at the 2011 mHealth Summit where she was painting at a booth and I facilitated a session on mobile health standards. Today she tweeted about needing to fill in some of the details of our story so she could paint. So I called and shared our story again. She said she had tried to find the answers on my website and blog and came up short. "You're such a wonderful writer," she said. "I wish you would write more."
That made me realize I had never really written out our story, though I've told it many times. It's a lovely tale worth repeating and today is a perfect day to do it. Not because of some magic of the day (though Reggie's paintings do provide a wonderful backdrop), but more because it's not been a particularly magical day. Kym is preparing to return to work after a ten-year hiatus and, in talking about sharing responsibilities and managing the mundane tasks of living life, I confess to being irritable and not particularly pleasant to be around. Taking the time to reflect on and put fingers to keys to document our early days is a perfect reminder of what is important and how much we have to celebrate. So let us go back to an evening, November 13th, 1999 in Burlington, Massachusetts...
I was a little over a month away from finishing my fellowship in medical informatics in Boston and had taken up ballroom dancing. I had always enjoyed dancing and wanted to learn enough to be able to lead on the dance floor--that last bastion of chivalry. I entered a Fred Astaire competition with my instructor as a novice. It's a bit of a racket and I've seen people spend thousands of dollars on lessons, costumes and entry fees, but it's also great fun and a way to forget about troubles--like not being able to find the woman of my dreams.
I'd been married once before--to a med school classmate--a marriage that was an extreme roller coaster ride of an experience and not something worth recounting here. It left me pretty bewildered and defeated, but enough years had passed that I finally felt ready to begin again and not so damaged that I couldn't believe in finding a soulmate. My aspirations weren't all that outrageous--simple really. There were only four criteria for my "ideal" partner: East Coast sensibilities, West Coast attitude, and Midwest values in a package that's easy to look at. Only trouble is I was having a very hard time finding all four of those qualities in a woman--at least one that wanted anything to do with me.
So by the time of my first (and, as it happens, only) ballroom dance competition, I was no longer intently seeking out a soulmate, but had resigned myself to the fact that I may be alone for a good while longer.
The competition was good fun. I receive first place in all of my dances (where I competed with other novices) and enjoyed watching the showcases and getting to meet other people from other studios. I also had a show that weekend at a Starbucks in Brookline, so I had brought my guitar to practice that Friday afternoon. I ended up playing for a woman and her teenage daughter as they took tickets at the hotel ballroom. Then I drove back to Boston, did my show and came back the next day for my final rounds of competition and the after-party--which is pretty much like a wedding reception except that everyone actually knows how to dance.
During the after-party, I was dancing in a conga line with a truly massive woman who hurried over to join her friends as soon as the song had ended. This was fine with me because one of those women was someone I had noticed earlier that evening from across the dance floor. She looked stunning in her black gown, with short dark hair swept back and a long, graceful neck that was poised just so on her dancer's shoulders. She reminded me more than a little of Audrey Hepburn.
This was, of course, Kym. She had come to the competition to root on a friend and had just started taking lessons herself. We were introduced and, after a few minutes of chatting, the other three women made themselves scarce. The only thing left to do was dance.
Kym had been learning the Latin dances--salsa, rumba, cha-cha--and hadn't really gotten into the smooth dances--the waltz, tango, foxtrot. So we spent some time in an on-the-fly lesson. My lead was just strong enough to get us through it, though I recall stepping on her dress once or twice. I was taken by Kym's grace, powerful presence, her dark brown eyes--"as close to black as brown dare go" as I recall one writer describing a similar pair--and her "regal bearing," which is the way Craig Robinson, the best man at our wedding, described Kym. I remember that night, as I walked Kym off the dance floor so we could find a quieter place to continue our conversation, commenting that I felt like royalty as I placed her left hand over my right and led her off (the competition was over, but the rules of propriety and etiquette still applied).
That conversation lasted until well after two in the morning. One of the first things Kym told me was that she was a cancer survivor--she'd been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma when she was seventeen--and that being a survivor was the most important experience in her life. She had also survived a pretty shitty childhood as an only child of two alcoholic parents and had recently ended her second marriage. She also felt compelled to tell me (not that we were ever going to even date, mind you) that she wasn't going to have children. I think she figured I must have wanted a half dozen of them because of my past profession as an obstetrician. But the radiation that took her to within an inch of her life in order to save it had done quite a number on her. She both doubted that she could have a successful pregnancy and feared that the health risks (melanoma in particular) were too high to risk it.
I was more than fine with that--even with her insistence that she was in no way looking for a relationship. I actually believed her. But I also saw that she was everything I was looking for in a partner and was willing to wait it out and see where this could take us.
By the time we parted for the evening, the morning was just a few hours away. She would be heading back to Connecticut with her friends and I back to Boston. There was a breakfast in the morning for which neither of us had purchased tickets (see earlier comment on Fred Astaire and racket), but she said her friends were going and she would be down there with them.
The next morning, I get to the breakfast and find the same woman who had been my practice audience on Friday afternoon taking tickets for the meal. I told her that I didn't want to eat anything; I just wanted to meet someone in there who was expecting me. She was resolute: no ticket, no entry. But, come on--you can trust me. Hadn't I sung you all those wonderful songs just the other day? No ticket, no entry. Finally, I was desperate. "Look," I said. "The woman of my dreams is in there right now and I really need to see her." "How can you be sure she's the woman of your dreams?" "How can I find out if you don't let me in!"
Finally, she relented. I found Kym (who had had no difficulty getting past the same sentry despite her own ticketless state) and we had a brief conversation, exchanging phone numbers and email addresses.
Phone calls continued most every day from that point, with Kym still insisting that she wasn't looking to get involved with anyone. I still believed her, but continued to hold hope that things would change in time.
Time went a lot faster than I expected. Within a couple of weeks, she invited me to come visit in Connecticut so we could go out dancing together at a Latin club. Then Thanksgiving came around and her plans of sharing the holiday with a friend and her kids fell apart when they all got the flu. She also learned that weekend that a high school classmate had taken his own life.
So Kym was feeling pretty alone when I called her from Ohio, having just arrived at my parents house to celebrate the holiday. As we talked, it was my mother who, having overheard some of our conversation, suggested that Kym come have Thanksgiving with us.
This was the clincher for me. Anyone crazy enough to fly to Ohio on a moment's notice to share a holiday was someone worth spending a life with. She looked into flights for Thanksgiving morning (a pretty slow day in the midst of an otherwise chaotic travel weekend) and arrived in Dayton about 12 hours after we spoke.
Christmas followed in short order and we shared another magical holiday together. There was now no doubt that we would share many more holidays and I told Kym that I wanted to marry her in a shop in Harvard Square right around that time. I also wrote this poem for her, modeled after her favorite Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You'll Go!:
Oh, the places We’ll go! With hopes flying highWe were officially engaged on Millenium Eve, just six weeks after we first met. We didn't set a date for a wedding as, having both been married previously, we weren't in any particular rush. But soon after, she was able to convince her company to let her keep her job as a financial software sales executive (where she was a top performer) and work remotely. We moved into an apartment just above the one I'd had in Brookline and set up shop.
We’ll soar through the air! Our limit, the sky!
Except when you fall and Deep Troubles brew
But when life is its darkest I’ll be there for you
And wouldn’t you know it? The opposite’s true!
When I’m in the Pickle you’ll bail me out too!
For life is just Grand! Despite the Rough Parts
And life’s even better when shared as Sweethearts
So here’s to the Journey! And our yet-revealed Fate
I’m honored to walk the unknown as your Mate
And as we go forward as Husband and Wife
I’ll cherish the night you danced into my life
It is late and there is much more to the story, but it will have to wait for the next post, Romance, Meet Reality. Stay tuned...
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