CHASTEN’S LIFE AND MINE had become so fully intertwined that I was completely unprepared for the jolt of a winter afternoon text, which led to seven minutes in which I doubted I’d see him again. He was abroad, getting an early start on a winter vacation in which I was to catch up to him a couple days later. I was working when the unreal-seeming text message lit up my phone: “Problem on plane—lots of commotion—don’t know what’s going on. Captain said making landing for ‘secret reason’—love you love you love you.”
I texted, paced, and waited, for seven inordinately long minutes, until another text came. He had landed, he wasn’t sure where. (It turned out to be Bucharest.) There had been a bomb scare on board. He was fine, but shaken; passengers had been crying, shouting, and a few were running in the aisles even as it landed.
When I finally caught up to him in Berlin, he asked me to walk with him to the Brandenburg Gate. Lit splendidly in the cold night, it was one of those landmarks that looks exactly the way it is supposed to. It was also, Chasten explained, a place he came to while he was figuring himself out as a teenage exchange student, watching the people come and go and fitting himself into a bigger world.
He described the terror as the plane made its steep and sudden descent. “All I could think about was how unfair it was that I would lose the chance to have a life with you,” he told me, and reached into his bag. “I’m not going to get on one knee, but . . .”
Now I was afraid again, for a different reason. I really did love him, and no other attraction or relationship had compared to the feeling of wholeness I had with Chasten. But it had been less than two years, and I still felt new at this. Our first date wasn’t just our first date; it came at the beginning of my dating life altogether. Now, it seemed, my boyfriend was proposing—and I wasn’t sure what to say.
What he said next made it clear he knew me better than anyone. He opened the box. “I know you’re not ready for marriage, but I want you to know how I feel. So instead of giving you a ring, I’m giving you . . . time.”
In the box was a watch.
A YEAR LATER, it was my turn to fumble for a box, and now it was definitely a ring. We were on another New Year vacation (the days between Christmas and New Year’s are the nearest it gets to a quiet time in the mayor’s office), and I had lured him to Gate B5 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, the spot where he said he was killing time between herds of exchange students when he first noticed my profile on his phone and began chatting with me. I had worked out what kind of ring he wanted—a platinum band with a little square diamond in the middle—and made sure his parents and mine knew about my plans. All that remained was to ask him.
This won’t sound romantic to those who don’t know us, but I had selected the space behind the gate agent’s desk, a three-foot-wide zone against the window where you have something resembling privacy while looking out on the tarmac. In a way, O’Hare had brought us together. Plus, the halfway-secluded space in the midst of the busy concourse was symbolic for how our life together would be. “I can’t promise you an easy life or a simple one. And sometimes privacy for us will be like this, stealing away a quiet moment even with people all around us. It won’t always be elegant. But I promise it will always be an adventure, and I promise to love you forever.” I went ahead and got on one knee.
Through the tears, he said yes.
THE DAY BEFORE THE WEDDING, Terry Glezman sized up the parking lot outside the enormous building known as LangLab. This was not exactly your traditional wedding reception venue—a disused former furniture factory slowly being turned into a mixed-use arts and entrepreneurial space, complete with a chocolate maker at one end, a print shop in the basement, and on the far side, a makeshift office for student interns working on soil samples for water quality projects.
It was quirky, but LangLab had ample space, a stage, and a bar. The price was right, and it perfectly captured the things we love most about South Bend: creativity, art, and transformation. We arranged for local art to be displayed in one room inside while a band and, later, DJ played in another. Dinner would be served outside, where guests could eat it in a tent or bring their tacos and sliders into the building.
Sweating in the morning heat, as he assessed the scene, Terry scanned the ground and concluded that the parking lot was not sufficiently level. So, of course, he decided to fix it. He somehow procured a wheelbarrow and a load of gravel, press-ganged a couple relatives into helping, and spent that Friday personally leveling it so it would be ready by the time of our reception, while Sherri hauled in boxes of wine from Traverse City and wrapped gifts for members of the wedding party.
Saturday afternoon, it was even hotter outside, but cool inside the Cathedral of Saint James. Chasten and I sat holding hands as friends gave readings, from poetry selections to the ending of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that, just three years earlier, had made this wedding legally possible to begin with. Father Brian Grantz, my pastor since I had moved home a decade ago, gave a moving sermon, assuring us that we were made for one another by God and reminding us to look for love in the spaces “between the divine and the mundane.”
At the altar, my voice dropped by an octave as I fought to get the words of the vow out before my emotions could stop me. Then came the customary yet unreal sequence: the rings, the kiss, the applause and cheer of our friends and family, the bishop’s blessing, and the summing-up by the deacon as the service came to a close: “Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.”
Like most newlyweds, I remember the reception itself mostly as a blur. There is the face of my mother, the happiest I have ever seen her, dancing with me to the Beatles’ version of “Till There Was You.” There is Chasten savoring a victory after besting me in a lopsided contest of Skee-Ball, on a pair of machines we had rented for the occasion. There are our friends singing in unison on the dance floor, seamlessly picking up for Bon Jovi as “Livin’ on a Prayer” is interrupted by a short power outage triggered by the taco truck outside. And there is the note from Sherri that I had found in my room while getting ready, rolled up in a BEST SON-IN-LAW EVER coffee mug, welcoming me to the family and ending, “Take care of my baby, he may be on a permanent loan to you but he will always be mine.”
18
Slow-Motion Chase
I wish it had not required a victory by Donald Trump for the political class to renew its interest in the industrial Midwest. Still, better late than never. For all the reasons I’ve described, the challenges and the promise of communities like ours belong nearer to the heart of our national discourse. When swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan punished the Democratic Party for its inattention by voting for Trump, for better and for worse our part of the country forced itself back onto the country’s political center stage.
To some, the 2016 election was a kind of revenge by “flyover country,” long ignored and misunderstood by the coastal elite in general and by the Democratic Party in particular. I certainly felt that our region had been ignored and misunderstood, but to me that did not have to lead to this kind of electoral outcome; our own story in South Bend showed that an honest and optimistic politics could resonate just as well in economically challenged communities. The 2016 election, it seemed to me, only made it more important for the national Democratic Party to take stories like ours on board, while better communicating shared values in terms that would make sense to people who live around here.