“The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.”
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every couple's life is their own private novel. It is a little personal history added day by day, experiences that can be remembered later with a word or even a look. Someone else talks about visiting some place … and with a glance at each other you can remember being there, the two of you.
Our private novel was about happiness and love. As simple as that.
She had favorite stories.
“Do you know when my dad was born?” she would ask friends who clearly did not. “He was born on January 14th. And one of my brothers was born on January 14th. And you know who else? Barry was born on January 14th!”
It was Capricorn destiny, proof that we were fated to be.
Her favorite story was how we first met, in the newsroom at the Seattle TV station where she was working as a reporter and anchor. I was there covering a US Senate race for the CBS Evening News. This was before the days of laptop computers. I had commandeered her desk and typewriter and was frantically working on a script against a tight deadline. Jan came back into the newsroom from an assignment.
“I walked in and saw this man sitting at my desk,” Jan would say. “I walked up and told him, ‘this is my desk, and I need it because I have to write my story.’”
Then came the part she loved the most. “He looked up at me, and he RIPPED his paper out of the typewriter and stomped away.”
When she can remember, it always makes her laugh. I didn't laugh at the time it happened and not for a while afterwards. But in time it became one of my favorite stories about us. It reminded me of how she was pretty and spunky and totally unimpressed by me, the big-time network news correspondent who was a touch too impressed with himself.
I blessed the day we were married and look at the wedding picture of our blended futures … Jan and me and my two daughters, Emily (7) and Julie (2), from my first marriage. When I look at the pictures from that night, I see in her face a radiated joy, a kind of total, sheer happiness that I never believed I could give a woman, and yet it seemed natural. My smile is real and, if you look closely, maybe a bit unbelieving that someone this amazing was about to become my wife. Until her, I had never believed a man could be that happy, and I definitely never thought it would be me. But she made it so.
It was going to be a struggle combining the girls, Jan, and me into one family, but we thought it was exciting. We both knew it would be complicated, and we both had no doubts that in the end it would be fine.
Because we had each other. That is what fine is all about.
There were plenty of real life concerns in our early days. It was 1985, and my bank account was pretty much empty from my divorce and the legal fees. At the time, I was based in the CBS News Bureau in San Francisco. Our love triggered her life-changing moment.
She was in Seattle and quit her job. We needed to be together. I drove up in my second-hand Oldsmobile, rented a U-Haul trailer, and we packed her small apartment and moved her to where I was, and to where we would make our lives one.
We managed to scrape some money together and buy a tiny house in San Francisco in a neighborhood called Eureka Valley which was, as quirky San Francisco goes, not in a valley at all, but on a hill. And not just a hill, but a steep, steep hill up from the Castro District of San Francisco.
Our house was one of several ticky-tacky row houses built in the 1950s for policemen or teachers as affordable housing in the city. We loved it because it was a part of the city, perfectly plain and a touch ugly on the outside since it was devoid of any architectural charm. It was a box with windows in a series of houses that looked like boxes all running together. The outside paint job stayed with the theme of very ordinary … beige. I remember thinking that even the roof was boring … perfectly flat.
I loved it because I could almost afford it, and Jan loved it because it was ours.
The main floor was a living and dining room and a true 1950s kitchen. And the best part was that it came with a small corner fireplace in the living room. Upstairs had the only bathroom and three amazingly compact bedrooms. Each floor, divided up as it was into different rooms, had just slightly more total space than our two-car garage on the street level.
It had been a rental house when we bought it, so it was wanting for love and care. Every wall needed paint. But we didn't mind since all the work was just another part of making it ours.
From the first floor at night, as the fog slipped over the western hills and started toward the city, we could look out our living room windows and watch the first strands drifting down our street. Then came the real gusts and finally, we would all but lose the houses across the street.
Upstairs, the largest bedroom faced the street and seemed the perfect master bedroom. From the windows, we could see over the neighbors' roofs and on to downtown; City Hall, the Bay Bridge, the San Francisco Bay itself. I thought how wonderful to put our bed in this room and wake up each morning to the glittering city of San Francisco.
And so we did. We lasted maybe two nights.
The steep hill we lived on started several blocks down from us, so by the time a car reached the street in front of our house, it was deep down into first gear and struggling against an almost 45-degree incline, transmission grinding and engine at full throttle. All night long, we would be tossed awake by yet another mechanical assault on the top of the hill.
We finally retreated to the back bedroom, a space so small that we could just fit our queen sized bed with one side flush against the wall. That meant we had to climb onto the bed to get the covers straightened on that side. But it was quiet.
Good things happened in that bedroom. And in the morning the sun would pour in.
Downstairs, carefully detailed wooden molding ran along the ceiling in the living/dining area, cupids, flowers or such—a touch of art in an otherwise cardboard box of a house.
“I'm going to paint it,” Jan announced one day. “Pink and gold.”
Along the way, she added blue to the mix, working slowly and carefully, highlighting the different parts of the molding. For weeks, she climbed a ladder each day with tiny brushes and painted. She added elegance to the space.
“It's all about colors,” she explained to me, the person who did not study art history in college.
And “all about color” was why she painted the walls her favorite color … a pale pink.
“They use this color in mental institutions,” she explained one day, which caught me by surprise. “It helps calm people. Don't you feel calmer?”
Well, of course.
Nothing escaped our attention, not even the hardwood floors, which we had refinished and polished to a bright sheen.
So when our day was over and the fog poured down our street, we would sit on the sofa in our (calm) little house and light a fire. We dimmed the lights and opened a bottle of champagne because life was good, and another day together was more than enough reason for a celebration.
Jan got part time work at the local NBC-TV affiliate, as a reporter and occasional anchor. One day she did a story on an urban Boy Scout troop having a summer campout on the rooftop of a San Francisco skyscraper, and the next day I found myself doing exactly the same story for the CBS Evening News.
That was a good night by the fireplace.
We were the Darling-Darling couple, because that's what we called each other. At Christmas, our presents to each other would be “From Darling, To Darling.”
When I called and she heard my voice, it was always: “Darling!” She was always happy to hear from me, whether I was calling from somewhere else in the world where I was on assignment, or from the office to chat about dinner.
Her parents (mine were long since gone) teased us because we always kissed. “That will end when the honeymoon wears off,” they said confidently.
But it didn't.
I am the child of a rocky marriage and a mother who struggled with the twin demons of alcoholism and chronic depression so serious she needed electro-shock therapy. Her struggles made for a difficult childhood and made me shy, reticent, and often suspicious of the world. Not Jan. If we passed someone begging on the street, and she felt the person was truly in need, she gave money. If she had none, she would give me that look and I dug into my pockets and put money into the cup or glass or hat.
Jan developed her taste for exploring the world early because her father was a globe-trotting vice president for Boeing, selling jetliners in China and Singapore and across Asia. It seemed normal to her that Dad would be gone for weeks and come home from places that, once she learned about them, were worthy of her curiosity and fueled her desire to visit.
She was the oldest of five and grew up taking care of brothers and sisters. They all grew up in the same house that was forever being remodeled as they got bigger and their needs changed. Summers as a kid meant out the door in the morning to the pool or to play with friends and then race back for meals. College was the University of Washington across town.
While in college, she scrimped and saved so she could travel around Europe one summer with friends. She loved it. They had no itinerary—when they got tired of one place they would take a train to somewhere else. It was the kind of trip that only those open to adventure could experience.
Adventure and travel may have been part of my appeal to her. Our life together was always about me coming and going on stories, or us coming and going on trips.
We came together because of our sureness about being a couple. There was no anticipation of adventure outside of the good things that happened when we were together.
But adventure came calling and we couldn't wait to see what was coming next. But adventure is like a coin – it can have two sides, one good, one devastating. For us, it would be both.