Touch You Last

Sarah was the first girl that I ever imagined being married to. This is 100% a true statement. I’m not misremembering or reinventing how I felt 30 years ago. I can’t remember precisely when that feeling hit me, but I know it was very soon after we got together. Before Sarah, there were girls I dated just to figure out what dating was, there were girls I dated where I knew things would be short term, and there were girls I dated where the relationship was barely even real. (I make it sound like there were teams of girls in each of those categories but there were literally three people.) Then, along came Sarah. We were friends for a long time before things progressed, and getting together wasn’t a sure thing. There was a sense of doom attached to it at first. We were both dating other people at the time and we were sure a lot of people would hate us if we ever got together. But then we broke up with the people we were dating, we got together – and it was magic. It was love between fr...

Ask anyone who has known Sarah to describe her in just a few words, and I guarantee that some variation of the word smart  will be the first thing you hear. (Often smart AF , maybe wicked smart  when you're within the Boston Metropolitan Area.) My girl has brains to spare. She knows a lot about a lot. If you're threatened by her intelligence, it speaks more about you than it does about her. In conversation, she's engaging; she listens - she doesn't steamroll over you (even though she probably already knows everything you're about to say long before you finish saying it). If you've got your facts wrong, she'll correct you in a kind way - unless you're a blowhard, and even then she won't dunk on you just for the sake of it. She's a very active listener and loves to add layers and nuance to what you're saying. She likes teaching people things they didn't know, but her brain really lights up when she's talking with someone and finds out ...

The term "rope-drop" has become a weirdly ubiquitous phrase in our family. I didn't realize how commonplace it was until this past summer when we were at a waterpark and Teddy suggested we rope-drop the lazy river ride.  If you've never heard the phrase before, it's essentially a Disney thing where you arrive at the park before it opens so you can march directly to your ride of your choice once the staff drops the rope. You typically target the most popular ride, and by rope-dropping, you have a 15 minute wait for the ride instead of a 2 hour wait if you get there later in the day. Sarah was a pro at this for our first Disney visit, and has perfected the art over subsequent trips. We've rope-dropped Seven Dwarves Mine Train, Radiator Springs Racers, Rise of the Resistance, Test Track, Web Slingers, Big Thunder Mountain - I won't attempt to do the math, but I can safely say she's saved us 25 hours of waiting with this skill (not counting subsequent park...

  Earlier this year, Sarah and I had a rare experience: a long car ride without the kids. It was just the two of us in the car for over four hours – with no kids shows playing in the background, no interruptions, no little ears nearby.   And we spent four hours just talking about us. I don't quite remember how it started, but it became this moment-by-moment retelling of our relationship from the very start – from back in high school as we were just becoming friends. For decades she has been my favourite person in the world, my best friend, the heart of all my best memories, and you'd think there wasn't much more we could learn about our story. But maybe through complete honestly, new perspectives earned over time, and Sarah's still shockingly good memory for details, we both learned things we didn't know. When we got home, I pulled out a box of old letters and it became this archeological dig. The words I’d written, I'll admit, were shockingly juvenile at time...

Understatement: Sarah is a reader. True statement (which may sound exaggerated but isn’t): Sarah has read over 200 books so far this year. She’s the voracious reader I wish I was and imagined I’d be when I was younger. Real books, e-books, audiobooks – she eats them all up. The area beside our bed is a minefield, where she’ll have 30 or so books within reach. (She only reads two or three at once, but she likes to have options.) Her interests are broad , and it’s easier to list off what she doesn’t like: sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She also doesn’t love depressing fiction, but she has read some of the most depressing-sounding non-fiction that you’ve ever heard of. Falling Home: Creating a Life That Catches You When You Fall, If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging, Invisible Women: Data Bias In a World Designed by Men; What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resistance, and Healing . True story – one night in bed, I rolled over around three in the morni...

My first draft of this began, "Sarah is not afraid of having difficult conversations." And from the outside, that seems very true. When she argues with someone who's being deliberately ignorant, or when she tells a friend or family member something they need to know but don't want to hear – she does it with  confidence and conviction. These are the conversations that most people would rather dive off a cliff then have, and she marches right into them, seemingly without fear. But that’s only the way it appears. She feels the same deep discomfort as you and I do, but pushes through that to say what needs to be said. About half the time, it’s the choleric in her that makes her speak up. When someone is promoting a mistruth, especially a dangerous one, she’s all over them. Anti-vaxxers beware because (in her own words) vaccination is the hill she will always die on. She regularly takes on relatives (of mine, sadly) who post White Lives Matter-style garbage on social media...