Rachel Simon's Blog

This video about book cover design aired on Dec. 19, 2010, on CBS Sunday Morning. The reporter was present at the offices of Grand Central Publishing when the book cover meeting for my upcoming novel, The Story of Beautiful Girl, was held over the summer of 2010. To my delight, the wonderfully eye-catching cover they decided on in that meeting – a cover I absolutely love – is featured from the 1:07 to the 1:20 mark in your time counter. As a reminder, the novel, along with the audio, e-book, and large print versions, hits the shelves on May 4, 2011, and is already available for pre-order. See this link for a reader’s guide and ordering information.

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Philadelphia was bathing in thirty-four degree sunshine when my husband Hal dropped me at airport. I lugged my bags into the terminal, noting that they felt heavier than they usually do when I travel to give talks around the country. I could have chalked the weight up to faulty memory, as I hadn’t done a presentation since the season of short sleeves. My energy level was also a notch below robust, as I’d just fought off a minor case of the sniffles.

But memory and muscles were fine. My suitcases were stuffed like overburdened sleds because I was on my way to Fairbanks, Alaska. There, over the next five days, I would be doing three presentations related to my book Riding the Bus with My Sister. And a trip to Fairbanks in the wool-fleece-and-thermals month of December simply necessitates bulk.

I’d almost squealed with delight when the Fairbanks Resource Agency contacted me in the spring and asked me to speak at their annual gala in December. Although I’d spoken for many service providers that support adults with disabilities and had even done such talks in Anchorage six years ago, I’d never been as far north as Fairbanks. And I’d been to Anchorage in April, right after “breakup,” when the winter snow suddenly melts, and when sunrise is at six in the morning, sunset near ten at night. I was now heading into a land of subzero temperatures, where daylight would commence after ten in the morning and depart by two thirty in the afternoon.

I made my way to the gate for the first of my flights, remembering Hal’s reaction when I got the invitation.

“Are you kidding?” he’d said.

“It’ll be an adventure!”

“Fairbanks in December?”

“If Jack London could do it, so can I.”

He’d made a scrunched-up face that he hadn’t unscrunched in the months since.

To be fair, Hal’s reticence about this trip was not simply the result of him envisioning himself slogging through a wind-swept, snow-drifted, dark-as-sleep nowhere. It was more a result of him knowing me.

I am not just someone who gets cold. I am someone who often wears a jacket in the summer, and in the winter I wear coats even inside the house. I get a chill deep inside my chest, and once it starts, there seems little I can do to stop it. This isn’t just imagination: touch my hands during these episodes, as people inevitably do when I meet them at talks, and you’ll be grabbing onto an ice glove.

How, Hal and other caring friends wondered as the day for my trip neared, would I possibly endure the extremes of a place like Fairbanks? Which, we found out the night before he took me to the airport, can get as cold as seventy below? And where sunshine itself is powerless to induce warmth? “You’ll spend the rest of your life thawing after this,” he said.

But how could I say no? I would be seeing a faraway land close to the tip of the globe, where all that is familiar to me about light and dark, winter and summer, ordinary and extraordinary would become but a memory, and new rules of day, night, cold, time, and even the colors of the sky would take its place. How could I not take the opportunity to shake up all I know about my relationship to things so fundamental, I can barely imagine my consciousness without them?

Besides, I kept wondering: what kind of people actually live there?

I got my first answer to this question soon after I arrived at the gate. My flight, which was supposed to depart at 1:00 PM, was delayed until at least 3:00 PM. This one change would prevent me from making my second connection, and so I spent the start of my trip rescheduling all my subsequent flights. My original plan was for three flights that would last fourteen hours. Now I would be taking four flights lasting twenty-two hours. A test of mere stamina became a test of endurance.

This is what Alaskans live with, I understood as I hunkered down for my first, second, and third waits. Not just snow and ice and wind and midnight sun and daytime night – but the need to expect the unexpected. And all the patience and fortitude that might be required.

I can do this, I thought, hauling my carry-ons through the concourses at Chicago O’Hare and Seattle-Tacoma International and Ted Stevens Anchorage Airport. Each time my effort proved harder and more laborious, and soon I was cursing myself for not having crammed even more into my checked bag. But then I’d think about the thousands of intrepid individuals who made this journey before the age of flight. My pitiful twenty-two hours would bear little resemblance to the months, or years, of hardship they endured on rail, stagecoaches, horseback, and ships. I told myself to enjoy the luxury of dozing on a seat in an airport, with music and televisions blaring, and babies crying, and, in Seattle, a water fountain that blasted loud glug-glug sounds whenever it was used. Stop kvetching, I told myself. Be tough.

Fortunately I forgot that sometimes, when people made the trek to the Last Frontier, the duration and the physical demands were so great, they fell ill, or even worse. This could happen to the hardiest of souls. So it was quite possible it could also happen to a twenty-first century city girl from the Northeast.

Who’d just—she thought—gotten over the sniffles.

And whose final, fourth flight—the one she’d had to reschedule herself onto—required her to walk across the tarmac in twenty below, schlepping the unbearably leaden carry-ons, so sleep-deprived and so confused by the darkness and the snow that she almost walked in the wrong direction.

So by the time I landed in Fairbanks at 7:00 AM (11:00 AM to me), my fate was sealed. I thought I was just exhausted from the four thousand mile ordeal that took me from thirty-nine degrees latitude to sixty-four degrees latitude and from thirty degrees Fahrenheit to twenty-two below. But my exhaustion was actually a portend—and the proof that my curiosity, adventurousness, and Jack London admiration surpassed the current limits of my constitution.

But for the first day I gallivanted about, unaware that my immune system was about to shut down. I was tired but with such a brief period of sunlight, I wanted to see all I could. After all, I immediately realized that Fairbanks was not what Hal and I had envisioned, and I realized I wasn’t just in a land of cold and dark. I was also in a land of surprises.

For starters, this was not a windswept, snow-drifted, dark-as-sleep nowhere.

There was, in fact, no wind—there rarely is in Fairbanks, I learned. Nor were there snow drifts, because Fairbanks tends to be too cold for snow; the more common weather challenge is ice fog, which so impedes visibility that it’s one of the few conditions that might close schools for the day. The terrain was mostly flat, and I didn’t even see mountains in the distance.

This was not a nowhere, either. It was a place with four military bases, a large university, a museum that’s an architectural wonder, multi-lane roads that pass the same stores we have in Delaware, a population of over thirty thousand—and more people who’ve relocated there from all over the country than I can remember seeing anywhere else. In fact, I heard almost every kind of accent a person can hear in America.

And whether they came from New Jersey, Long Island, Minnesota, Phoenix, Colorado, or California, no one I met, and no one I saw, allowed the weather to inhibit them in the slightest. They went to jobs and stores and coffee shops and movies and everything you can think of just as much as anyone in a warmer climate.

They did it all without the bulky clothes I’d schlepped across the country, preferring layers topped by sweatshirts or jackets when they were outside. And, when they were inside, a significant number of people wore t-shirts and short sleeves, even if the rooms were cool. How was this possible, I found myself asking over and over. To which the answer would inevitably be, “You just get used to it.”

I spent most of my first, still-healthy day with my escort, Eva Norwood, Community Development Director for Fairbanks Resource Agency. She picked me up at the airport, drove me to my hotel and then, over the course of the day, around Fairbanks. We rode in her trusty station wagon, fleece blankets on our laps, a horizontal crack across her windshield. “It’s impossible to avoid the cracks,” she said as we made our way along the snow-slicked roads—her car, with its studded snow tires, never skidding. “They cover the roads with gravel, and the little pebbles are always flying into your windshield. You can spend all winter repairing it, so I figured I’d just wait.”

Gravel-strewn roads and fleece blankets were just two ways people made their peace with driving in Fairbanks. In the interest of keeping their engines warm, they also leave parked cars running while they’re inside, as I discovered when Eva and I went to lunch at a packed Thai restaurant. They might even have upgraded their cars to include remote starters, which they have to reactivate every two hours. Those of more modest means can plug their cars into the engine block heaters that dot many, but not all, of the parking lots I saw.

The highlight of my tourist expeditions came that first afternoon, when Eva brought me to the Museum of the North. Located at the university, the striking building was designed to convey a sense of Alaska, with shapes and spaces evocative of alpine ridges, glaciers, and whales. The collection was equally stunning. One enormous room takes visitors through the five major areas of Alaska, each with its own history, animals, folk arts. Eva had once been a docent here, and by the end of my private tour, I had a vastly enriched appreciation for the state, and the resourcefulness of the people who’d inhabited it for millenia. Other rooms featured artwork by classic and contemporary Alaskan painters and sculptors. (At the end of this blog, I have additional photos I took while I was there.)

And then there was a room unlike anything I’ve experienced anywhere. Called “The Place Where You Go To Listen,” and created by composer John Luther Adams, it is a continuously changing sound and light art installation—with both the visual and the audio experiences derived from, as an article in the New Yorker once put it, “information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska…fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.” The sound on the day I visited hummed and tom-tommed, with harmonizing echoes like a choir in a cathedral; the colors were magenta shading into deep red. It differs at every visit, Eva told me; sometimes you hear the sun create more harmony, the moon make dapples of sound, and the Northern lights ring across the ceiling like bells. The room reminded me of my beloved light tunnel in the Detroit Airport, which I wrote about in The House On Teacher’s Lane. But this was a tiny space, and the sounds and lights weren’t pre-set; they were happening in real time, reflecting the current state of this corner of the planet. I could have stayed in there forever.

But the sun was setting, and as we emerged from the galleries in the museum and looked out the windows over Fairbanks, I learned that I needed to correct yet another misunderstanding. I’d thought of this part of Alaska as a place of extremes. Standing beside me at the window, though, Eva pointed out that it’s a place of subtleties.

At this time of year, the sun doesn’t rise, or set, in the way it does back in the Northeast. Instead, it stays low along the horizon. So the sky is a study in golds and pinks and pale blues—which then reflect on the snow. “We don’t have white snow here,” she told me. “You think it’s white until you really look and see it’s not.”

Later, when I went out for dinner with three other people affiliated with Fairbanks Resource Agency, I learned more about subtleties. “We don’t have real darkness here,” there told me. “You think it’s dark but it’s not.” I asked how that could be; when I looked out the window, it sure looked like my idea of night. “Yes,” they said, “but with the snow reflecting the stars and the moon, we don’t really have dark skies.” Not the way the skies can be dark in, say, rural Hawaii or Arizona, they added, where they sometimes spend the winter, and where the nights are so completely dark that they actually feel scared.

In Fairbanks, they added, they never feel scared. Rather, they feel at peace with nature—and embraced by everyone around them. “It’s one big family here,” they said. “If you see someone broken down on the road, you stop to help. That’s just the way it is.” They all moved here from the lower 48, and love Fairbanks so much, they never want to live anywhere else.

I went to bed that first night, amazed at how wrong I’d been about this place, and eager to learn so much more.

But by the next morning, my immune system had surrendered. I woke with a ferocious sore throat and thudding headache. I still hoped to get out to see other sites, to stand a chance of catching a glimpse of the aurora borealis, to meet new people and learn more surprises.

I did manage to have a few more conversations. During a marvelous dinner with Emily Ennis, Executive Director of FRA, I learned she entered the field decades ago by without training, family ties, or preconceptions; she just walked into a room of adults with disabilities in Fairbanks who needed to be occupied during the day, and instantly understood that they were full, whole individuals desirous of living meaningful lives. I also connected with a waitress in my hotel restaurant who was the sister of a woman with a disability, and who spoke tearfully about her sister’s transition from living in the state institution to a community setting. Politics also crept into some discussions. Yet even though folks in the lower 48 seem to think immediately about Sarah Palin when they hear the word “Alaska,” the people I met were less inclined to talk about her than about the recent, contentious Senate race, which Lisa Murkowski won over Joe Miller by a write-in vote.

I also managed to get through all three of my events—a book discussion, a visit to a writing class at the university, and the big, fancy gala dinner. I enjoyed all three, and I think I satisfied my audiences at each.

But my tourist expeditions were behind me.

So I spent the rest of my time in Alaska in my hotel room, savoring yet another unexpected aspect of this part of the world. In the dark and the quiet, it is easy to sleep. Your dreams rise and fall like whales, your thoughts beat steadily as the bells of the Northern lights, and your feelings ease through you as subtly as horizon light.

I am no Jack London. I would have made a frail pioneer.

But I’m hoping my host asks me back, and I’m told they probably will. I’ll be keeping my sense of adventure warm until then.

This is a story about how everyone deserves love.

First, please meet my mother. For the past two decades, she’s lived in Florida with her husband, and both are retired. Every spring for the last few years, they’ve driven the thousand miles north to Pennsylvania, where he grew up and they met long ago. They travel in a mobile home, which they then park in a campground for the entire summer. The campground is a few hours from where I live.

This is my mother’s husband. He does all the driving because a few years ago, my mother became too forgetful to cook a meal, much less drive a car, and was eventually diagnosed with senile dementia. She still lives at home, and he’s her caregiver.

They love each other very much and are each other’s constant companion and best friend. They’ve been married for almost thirty years.

I see them as much as I can when they’ stay up north. My mother still knows who everyone is and can carry on a conversation for short periods, but she has large and ever-growing gaps in her memories. It’s hard knowing that any visit I have with her might be the last time she remembers who I am.

Until a year and a half ago, my mother and her husband doted on their pet cockatiels, Lemon and Pumpkin, who were also each other’s constant companion and romantic partner. Their feathered bond lasted for a gloriously happy twenty years, all of which they spent with my mother and her husband. Then, suddenly, Lem passed away. Pumpkin pined away for months, and then he died, too.

My mother and her husband were bereft. They loved these birds so much, they’d long ago stopped using airplanes when they traveled, as they disliked having the birds out of their sight. That’s why they got the motor home, which gave them the ability to drive across the country as a foursome, the birds happily entertaining the humans from their cage, the humans adoringly catering to the birds’ every need. They’d even hired an artist to paint a picture of Lem and Pumpkin on the side of the motor home. At some point, my mother’s husband bought a special box for a double coffin, saving it until the time came so they could be laid to rest in style – and together.

The silence was overwhelming after their beloved birds were gone. There was no one to sing along with the radio, or to dance in the cage, or to display his or her feathers. No one whistled back when my mother said, “Good morning.”

I am a hospice volunteer and spend a lot of time in an assisted living facility, where many of the residents have Alzheimer’s. I see that while some people have regular visitors, others have none, and although I can’t detect a difference in the progression of their condition, I’ve come to suspect that loneliness encourages insecurity, neediness, fear, even desperation. Everyone, regardless of the state of their cognitive abilities, needs to know they’re loved – and needs to have the opportunity to love another back. Whether or not it makes us live longer, I cannot say; but it deepens and enriches every moment that we’re here.

This summer, my mother and her husband came up north in July, planning their return drive to Florida for mid-September. I visited several times, and told them I’d come back one final time a few days before they were scheduled to leave.

But an interesting thing happened a week before that last visit. I went to get my hair cut.

This is Michele. She lives twenty minutes from me and has a sunny room in the back of her house where she cuts hair. She has a warm and caring personality, and always does a great job with my curly mop.

It’s very peaceful in Michele’s haircutting room. She’s the sole employee, and at most I encounter only one other customer, though often it’s just Michele and me. The atmosphere is easy and informal, and, because her family sometimes stops in to say hello, I’ve gotten to know her daughters, husband, and pets. Right now she has two dogs but for a while she had a bird, too. The bird passed away, but she retained a fondness for feathered creatures.

In early September, when I went to Michele’s for my haircut, I opened her back door and, to my surprise, saw a new bird. It was a cockatiel, no less, who was instantly eager to say hello.

“Who’s this?” I asked, walking up to the cage.

“That’s Rudy,” Michele said.

Rudy, who’d already been bouncing around the cage trying to get closer to me, grew even more alert at the sound of his name. Full of energy and blessed with an insistent friendliness, he was instantly likable.

“Where did Rudy come from?” I asked, not taking my eyes off him.

“One of my other customers. He’s only three years old, and her family has grown so much that they recently realized they have too many children to pay enough attention to Rudy. She mentioned that she was thinking of putting him on Craig’s List, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll take him.’ I hated the thought of him being on Craig’s List.’”

I did, too. Rudy was clearly smart and engaged, and his personality instantly struck me as larger than life. It was terrible to think of him ending up with someone who paid the highest bid, and who might not love him as much as, well, as much as he deserves. And everyone deserves to be loved.

I said, “You know, my mother and her husband had two wonderful birds who passed away. I think they’d love Rudy.”

Michele said, “He’s a very nice bird.”

I said, “I feel strange asking this, but…I’m going to be seeing them in a few days. Can I tell them about him?”

“Sure.”

Michele then cut my hair. And right after I left to go home, her daughter, who’d been listening to us from the living room, said to Michele, “I think Rachel really wants that bird for her mother.”

A few days later, I drove to see my mother and her husband, as planned.

And after we’d gotten caught up, I told them about Rudy. “He looks just like Pumpkin,” I said. “He’s bursting with affection. If Michele was willing to part with him, would you want to take him in?”

My mother immediately teared up. “Yes,” she said.

Her husband said, “Oh, three years is a really good age. And it would be so great to have another bird. And we still have all the food and toys and everything we need. But would she really let Rudy go?”

“Rudy sounds wonderful,” my mother said, gushing.

I said, “How about if I call Michele and get her thoughts?”

Right then and there, I dialed Michele. She laughed because she’d been thinking I’d get in touch. Then she checked with her family, and moments later, she called back. “Yes, your mother and her husband can have Rudy,” she said. “We like him, but we haven’t bonded yet. And we know that we’ll treat him like a prince – but they’ll treat him like a king.”

So a few days later, I went to see my mother and her husband one more time, and led them in my car to Michele’s house.

My husband Hal, who also wanted to meet Rudy, was waiting for us. Michele greeted us all warmly. Then we went into her haircutting room, where Rudy awaited.

Hal was immediately taken by Rudy.

Michele brought him out of his cage.

And my mother gave him a kiss.

We carried Rudy outside, set him in the car for the ride back to the campground, and hugged each other goodbye.

Moments later, they drove off with their beautiful new companion. As always, I felt sad, not knowing what state my mother might be in when I see her again. Yet I also felt I’d done a good thing.

A few days later, when they were halfway to Florida, my mother’s husband called. “This is a magnificent bird!” he said. “He’s so friendly. He gets on our shoulders and nuzzles our faces. Your mother sings to him and he sings back. They’re already getting totally attached. We totally love him.”

I could imagine my mother in the background, Rudy on her shoulder as she cooed to him. I don’t know how much longer my mother will remember who I am. But because of one family’s need for help, one hair dresser’s generous spirit, one customer’s luck in scheduling a haircut just when she did, and one bird bursting with affection, I do know that every minute that my mother – and her husband and Rudy – have left on this earth, they will know that they’re loved, and that they will have someone else to love back.

For two separate but intertwined reasons, this is a momentous week.

First, my husband Hal and I celebrate our ninth anniversary. But the number nine is deceiving. Even if we were traditionalists, which we’re not, we’d feel obliged to skip the pottery and willow gifts nine-year spouses showered upon each other in earlier eras and instead bestow the silver wreaths that commemorated twenty-five years, or the pearls of thirty. That’s because our marriage came about only after one of the most ridiculous courtships in history—thirteen years of living together, followed by a heartrending break-up, proceeding into six years in the emotional desert, tiptoeing into several months of reconnection, friendship, and a new romance, and culminating in a walk in our wedding finery to stand before the justice of the peace.

So our anniversaries are as much triumphs over our past as toasts to our future. And when you have to add nineteen years of past to the official number that marks your present, traditional gifts come to seem absurd.

“Then what are you giving each other?” people ask.

Every year so far in our marriage, I’ve downplayed the answer. We’ll just be going for a nice walk somewhere, I’ll say, or out to dinner. While this response is true, it’s far from complete. I rarely feel comfortable offering the complete answer, especially when this half-answer is met with disappointed looks. It seems that, for many people, even those who are also disinclined to be traditionalists, they expect significant expenditures of money: a vacation to the Bahamas, a trip to a Broadway show, an attractive bauble I could wear on my wrist. Grand, costly gestures to prove—what? That we’ve survived a trek through the terrain of nine calendars? That we’ve kept the flag of commitment we planted nine years ago from shredding? That, despite the tornadoes out in the distance, we’re still partners on this wagon, and we’re continuing forward together?

I hope the pottery, jewelry, and willow industries will forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think couples need expensive gifts to prove these things. Particularly not if, on the journey to and through matrimony, they were lucky enough to discover an even more valuable gift. A gift that comes from error and misjudgment, reflection and reappraisal, effort and resolve. A gift that doesn’t fit into a Tiffany box or require a Caribbean beach, and was harder to earn than money. The gift of really trying to understand not what love is supposed to be, but what it really is.

This gift is the more complete answer to “What are you giving each other?” Yet to talk about it would take a deeply honest conversation that might stretch for a few hours. Such candid disclosures rarely have a place in casual exchanges about anniversaries, or marriages, or any kind of relationship, romantic or otherwise. So for the most part, we keep those answers to ourselves.

Unless, if you’re like me, you like to write—and you especially like to write books.

This brings me to the second reason that this is a momentous week.

A few years ago, I found myself writing about my lengthy, hilly, potholed road to marrying Hal. I hadn’t planned to do so; not only had I already published one memoir, about my relationship with my sister Beth, but Hal and I were embarking on a major renovation of our hundred-year-old row house. And even though he’s an architect and was going to oversee the project, I knew we were in for far too much turmoil to accommodate the writing of a book. Yet when I sat down to write some short stories, my pen appeared to have other ideas in mind: a chronicle of the renovation that was also about what I’d thought love was supposed to be, and how I shifted into learning what love really is. As we progressed from the decision to renovate to Hal’s plans to the demolition and wiring and wallboard and paint, the entire project revealed itself to be a grand analogy for the repairs we made in our relationship—and that I’d made, over the years, with others. These repairs included familiar concepts that are far more formidable to employ, and sustain, than I’d imagined, such as forgiveness for misjudgment, compassion for histories, and respect for differences. They also included an awe about all there is to learn, and see, and live, and an appreciation for the single moment, with one individual, when you realize you’ve met a kindred spirit.

And that book, The House On Teacher’s Lane: A Memoir of Home, Healing, and Love’s Hardest Questions, is coming out this week.

I should clarify something. The House On Teacher’s Lane is not the first time this book has appeared in the world. Like my relationship with Hal, it had a first incarnation, when it was released in hardback a year ago. Also like that relationship, where we were known as boyfriend and girlfriend rather than life partners, this book was originally known by another name, Building A Home With My Husband. But now, with the book being released in paperback, its new name is more in keeping with the truths it shares, which are less about the material world of hammers and wiring, and more about the inner world of emotions and realizations.

These are the complete truths I haven’t told people when they’ve asked what I’m giving Hal for our anniversary. But by happy coincidence, this year, for our ninth anniversary, I can answer. What I try to give him on that day is what I wrote in that book. And actually, it’s what I try to give him every day—and all the other people I love, too.

Because I am not sitting with you right now, talking for hours over cups of tea, but because I would like to share some of the truths I wrote about in The House On Teacher’s Lane, I’m ending this entry with an except from the book. Occurring early on in the story, after I’ve reluctantly agreed to renovate the house, and Hal has begun drawing the plans, it’s when I first begin to confront the question of just what love really is.

You can also learn more about The House On Teacher’s Lane, or order a copy, by clicking here.

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How hard I used to focus on the ways Hal and I differed. He spoke slowly. My words came out like a ticker-tape machine. He had a handful of friends, I, a cast of thousands. He did yoga, I power-walked. He stayed up late, I fell asleep early.

None of these differences truly irked me, but that could not be said of the effort he put into composing music. This would seem to be less a difference than similarity, since I devoted so much energy to writing. But Hal’s compositions were influenced by such non-mainstream performers as Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow, Ornette Coleman, and Gong, and my listening preferences were the Beatles and silence. Also, he rarely finished his pieces. I’d sit at my desk, losing my concentration as his snippets drifted into my study—and I’d steam. Why create atonal music when he was equally fond of melody? How could this man live with himself if he didn’t finish things? And: if we have such fundamental disparities, how could this be true love?

True love—that was the crux of the matter. The couples at college who were so in sync, they’d dance at parties with their eyes closed. John and Yoko, who shared dreams of peace and iconoclasm. Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall. As for my true love? I knew just who he was. An unwritten but very exacting list.

It was a list of my own tastes and traits (well, the good ones), as well as specific physical attributes, and early in my love life, one boyfriend had satisfied most of it, assuming I overlooked his determination to never love me. Yet I believed a perfect fit merely awaited discovery. So even though Hal’s looks were strikingly aligned with my fantasy, even though all my friends thought him a man of fine character, even though he made me feel cherished, a few checks were missing on my list. Therefore, how could he possibly be The One?

Only during the six years of our breakup did I start wondering if my idea of love was just a teensy bit askew. Actually, I came to feel horrified with myself. The couples I’d known in college, I remembered, had all gone down in flames. Yoko threw John out of the house. Movie couples often resulted from matches made in adultery.

I hadn’t wanted a man. I’d wanted a mirage.

Ashamed at having duped myself for my entire life, terrified that I was thirty-six, I decided that I had to approach love as an apprentice. Only this time, I’d look at couples I knew firsthand.

Initially, I looked to my parents, who’d created rewarding marriages with other partners. But how? My mother lived in Florida with her third husband, and I was feeling too foolish to ask them about love over the phone. My father and his second wife lived a few hours from me, but I felt just as awkward querying them.

The big breakthrough happened on a simple phone call. I was speaking with a friend, Harriet, who was still devoted to her husband Vic of forty years, as was he to her. In the background I heard piano music. I knew Vic owned many recordings of jazz greats, so I asked Harriet, “Who’s Vic playing?” She said, “That is Vic. He’s taken piano lessons for years.” I’d never known this, and I asked, “Do you like what he plays?” She laughed. “I like jazz okay, but he’s terrible.” I gasped. Then I asked, “Doesn’t that bother you?” “Why should it?” she said. “It makes him happy. That’s what matters to me.”

Of course. My mother didn’t garden all day like her husband, nor did he read mysteries like her. My father spent his days reading The New York Times, his wife sewing. But both couples encouraged their partner’s differences.

So when Hal reached for my hand on the third floor of his house and I embraced the second incarnation of our relationship, I decided to adopt Harriet’s perspective. The effect was instant. No longer did I judge Hal’s enthusiasms by whether I shared them or had them on my list, but by whether, in his opinion, they made his life more worth living. How quickly my life doubled then. How easily we got along.

Now, feeling able to give and receive the love I’d craved all those years before, I understand why Hal’s architectural plans are unleashing ideas inside me. Architecture is a blend—of form and function, solids and voids, scale and proportion, weight and mass—and love is a blend, too. Of two people’s pasts and presents, similarities and differences, flaws and strengths, respect and forgiveness. It too is a design, ever-evolving. Especially if you can admit you could be wrong.

Excerpt from The House On Teacher’s Lane: A Memoir Of Home, Healing, and Love’s Hardest Questions, which is being released by Plume on May 25, 2010. Available in bookstores everywhere, or through these links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Indiebound.