Deena and I first met online about eight months after my wife died. After a few weeks of trading messages, Deena invited me to meet her on a Saturday afternoon for an Oktoberfest festival in McKinney, TX. We spend four or five hours talking, listening to the music and watching people drift by. Afterwards, we had a wonderful dinner at Deena’s favorite restaurant, Mio Nonno, in Allen. The following Saturday, it rained and we watched videos all day. By then, it was October. With plans to attend the State Fair of Texas and her church in the coming weeks, we were off to a good start.
During this same time, I was still meeting with my personal counselor who I’d known since 1999. She had a Ph.D in psychology and she was very easy to talk to. We’d meet irregularly, sometime twice a month, sometimes only twice in as many years. A sample of typical occasions when we’d talk were when my mother died, when my son was getting married, immediately after 9/11, when the College was preparing for a reaccreditation visit, or there were other job stressors, and when my wife was particularly ill. Then, I would seek out Dr. Fisher. She would generally not offer me advice, but if something seemed out of joint to her, she would reflect back what I had said.
Dr. Fisher knew when I was about to visit Deena. Afterwards, she asked me how things were going. I told her that Deena was very important to me in some way that I could not precisely explain nor understand. I thought about it before going on, and I said that Deena was like a valuable book to me, but the pages of the book were all blank. I knew then that the pages were blank because Deena and I had not yet had any experiences together to fill those pages. They would come later and the pages in the book would quickly fill. Dr. Fisher seemed to understand. Last night, Deena and I watched the movie Pleasantville together, and that image of a blank book filling with detail page-after-page came alive.
In the more than five and one half years since that afternoon on the bench in McKinney, we have filled that book with life experiences and fond memories such as trips to places I had never been before, meeting new friends and family, living in the Catskill Mountains and navigating the nuances of life during a pandemic. We’ve experienced both sickness and health and we have supported one another throughout, as we trusted on the promises of God. The fact that we got married only eighty-nine days after we first greeted each other in person probably raised some eyebrows.
When we first met, Deena and I were probably close to ninety-five percent compatible on paper. We essentially agreed on religion, politics, and that we both saw New York State, where we were both raised, as home. We had each spent twenty or more years involved with the military, so we shared a common armed forces socialization and vocabulary and did not have to explain to each other acronyms such as “TDY” or “MWR.” Our current careers were as educators. Before we met, our grandchildren used the same German gender diminutives to refer to each of us (Omi and Opa.) As it turned out, we even have the same blood type! But what was challenging was that last five percent. It’s true that we did not have the same roadmap as we might have had if we had the opportunity for a much longer engagement in which to imagine the future. But we both knew where North was, and trusted in One Who was “constant as the northern star.”
We could not have forseen the pandemic, three moves in five years, a world in chaos and my emerging health issues, some chronic and others acute. But we hope for the best, plan for the worst and live day by day as well we can. We also thank God for meeting each other and wait–sometimes impatiently–to see what lies ahead.