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TwitThisLately we've been bringing joy to total strangers.
How? Easy. We got married.
It began like this: One icy day last winter, we headed down to the bureau of licenses in lower Manhattan. There was a security guard at the door, a big, beefy fellow, and Albert asked him where to go for a license.
"What kind of license?" the guard said.
"Marriage," Albert said.
Marriage! The guard stared at our faces, which clearly belonged (still do) to a pair of septuagenarians. And then he went totally gaga:
"You folks are getting married? Fan-tastic!" Pulled off his cap and waved it in the frigid air. Took off a glove, grabbed Albert's hand in his massive paw.
"You've made my day! Hey, Mike, come over here. Get this! These folks are getting married!" Mike also went gaga.
We went to buy a wedding band. The saleswoman looked at Albert, looked at me and looked uncertain. "For...your daughter?" she asked cautiously.
"For us," Albert said.
"For you? Oooh-ooh! I just love it. Helen! Stacy! Listen!" Helen, who was maybe 40, and Stacy, who looked like a high-schooler, loved it too.
It kept happening. The florist, the wine merchant, the cake-maker for our small family wedding ... strangers all. At first we couldn't figure it out. Why were people going bananas about the marriage of a pair of total strangers?
Soon after the ceremony, we went to a party where we were introduced to a woman as newlyweds, and she said, "Oh, my goodness!" Hands clasped to bosom, dreamy smile. "You've made me so happy. I could cry." And, in fact, her eyes brimmed over. Now we got it. How could we not? It had nothing to do with us, really (oh, sure, with the way we looked; but beyond that, nothing). It was all about themselves.
Somehow, this marriage made them feel good about themselves -- about their own hopes that might not yet have been fulfilled, and that perhaps they had begun to think might never be fulfilled. Especially in the department of love.
I checked out our theory with our longtime friend, Dr. Ethel Person, the noted Manhattan psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. "Oh, no," she said. "You're exactly right. Exactly. There is such a powerful bias in this country toward believing that over a certain age, unless you're with someone, you'll never be with anyone. For people to see a pair like you opens up new possibilities for themselves. You become a wordless message that there can be new beginnings, second chances all through the life cycle."
But it is not just about love. We are also talking about work, friends, family connections, new ambitions, new adventures -- as Dr. Person says, "renewal in every way."
It is sweet stuff, renewal -- especially when unexpected. And I certainly did not expect it.
I had been widowed for many years when Albert came along. To tell the truth, there had been other men in those years. Fine men, worthy of loving, but never, as it happened, any I did love or wanted to share the rest of my life with. Which was okay. I had those pleasant romances, I had my work, my cherished friends, I could have gone on like that and been just fine. But face it: Love is more. Love is bigger. Love is other.
Then I went one evening to the home of friends for dinner. Table set for six (my favorite dinner-party number, the coziest, absolutely the best for conversation), and the sixth was the proverbial tall, handsome stranger -- lanky, cute gray Vandyke beard, somewhat austere.
It was not a fix-up. He was a recent widower, "a basket case," my hosts told me sotto voce. They hoped to draw him out.
At the table, someone asked how long ago his wife had died. Eight months, he said. And suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, I found myself catapulted back through time to when I had been just eight months widowed, to precisely how that had felt, and I lost it. I began to cry, not decorously but loudly, pungently, the for-heaven's-sake-go-blow-your-nose kind of crying, and I mumbled my apologies and ran to another room.
He followed me. It stunned me then, and stuns me still -- that this man who bore such grief of his own should come to comfort me. He was no longer austere. He sat down beside me, gave me his handkerchief, peered into my face and said, "I know, I know."
It made a powerful, instant connection. It enabled us to bypass the usual getting-to-know-you stuff, because people who've had the experience of losing a beloved one already do know one another in a special, intimate way -- a way those who've never mourned really can't understand.
He called the next week to invite me to dinner. It was an awkward call.
("Remember," he said later, "I hadn't asked a woman for a date in 40 years. What if you'd said no?" As for myself, all through that long week I had been thinking: Damn it, why doesn't he call? Doesn't he want that handkerchief back?) But from the first evening together, it was a total comfort zone.
We became An Item, which seemed to please our families and friends. ("My grandpa has a girlfriend," his six-year-old granddaughter told her neighbors.) After a year -- ah, impetuous youth! -- we combined households. My closest friends gave a party for us, in the apartment I was leaving. Swell party, warm toasts. But it was this past winter, when we decided to marry -- well, that's when everyone got really twinkly. Including the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. Everyone.
I have been thinking about this a lot. We all love love, of course. But I suspect that what everyone loves even more is second-time-around love. It seems to speak to each observer in a more personal way. I look into the pleasure-glazed eyes of strangers and I think, This makes you feel good, does it? Terrific. Be my guest.
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