Long before he found his falling star, Billy understood something about what it was like to plummet unexpectedly into a new world. Given up by his biological parents soon after he was born, he had been adopted and raised, like a child in a fairy tale, by a poor but loving couple who had no children of their own: he was, as we used to say, a foundling. His adoptive parents—forever after, to him, simply his parents—worked in a local cannery, saving up their money in coffee cans to try to buy a farm. When a fire tore through the shantytown where they lived and the cans and their contents burned up, they started over. By the time they had set aside enough to purchase a home, they were getting on in years, and they started thinking about how nice it would be to have some help around the place and someone to pass it on to after they were gone. Thus it was that Billy came along.
America, at the time, was reveling in its modernity. Elvis was on the radio, television sets were taking over the living room, and thousands of brand-new Thunderbirds were about to hit the road. But Billy rode to town as his father’s father would have done, in a horse-drawn wagon, and the house he shared with his parents had no indoor plumbing. He did not much feel the lack, scarcity and poverty being common all around him. Whatever was happening in the rest of the country, he grew up in a place where a man asked to indicate his profession might answer “rabbit hunter,” and a boy might miss a month of school in harvest season to help out on the farm.
Billy was one such boy, but he didn’t mind the disruption. A middling student who seldom enjoyed his classes, he was happier out in the fields than in a schoolroom anyway. Still, he had an uncommon mind—quick to grasp a problem and patient while solving it—and he learned everything his parents taught him with alacrity. His father was fair, demanding, taciturn, and exceptionally hardworking—the kind of rough-hewn, reserved, practical type Wallace Stegner once called “a man with the bark on.” His mother was softer, and doted on her sweet-tempered, late-in-life son. Billy, who turned out as he was raised—honest, grateful, good-humored, unafraid of hard work—buried them both before he turned twenty-five.
By then, he could build or fix almost anything, like his father before him; but, also like his father, he had known from early on that he wanted to farm. He made a go of it, but for his generation, it was virtually impossible to survive with fewer than two hundred acres, plus equipment that could easily run to tens of thousands of dollars. For Bill, as he was known by then, it was miles out of reach. He sold his parents’ farmhouse and found work at the local A&P, first as a cashier, then as a clerk in the dairy department. Time passed, faster than it once had done. One day while he was working at the store, a young woman came in to do her shopping. He asked around, and the bread-delivery man said he knew her; she was a local girl by the name of Sandy, one of seven children of a mother widowed young. Bill said that, in exchange for her phone number, the bread man could be best man at their wedding. By the end of their first date, she had turned that other gift from the universe into the second-best thing he had ever found. Six months later, at the little church she had attended in childhood, he married her.
Like his parents, Bill was frugal. No matter how little he made or how much he did without, he had never stopped saving money, and no matter where he lived or what kind of work he did, he had never stopped missing the family home. After the wedding, he bought it back, but by then, the farmhouse had succumbed to termites; he wept the day he decided that he had to tear it down. But one winter morning after a blizzard blew through, he and his new wife lay down outside and made snow angels to mark the place where they would build a log cabin for themselves and the children they hoped to have. Not long after, they broke ground. Before work in the mornings, after work in the evenings, on weekends, on holidays: for three years they labored at it, hauling away two thousand wheelbarrow loads of dirt to dig out the foundation, notching and chiseling and placing each one of hundreds of logs, mortaring the gaps, nailing down the shingles, framing the rooms, raising the chimney, placing hearthstones for the two woodstoves that would keep the whole place warm. Friends and family helped lay the footer and hoist the roof beams, but for the most part they built it themselves, by hand.
When it was finished, the cabin sat in a large clearing, bordered by a stand of trees with a seasonal creek running through it. Inside, in addition to the main room, there was a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms downstairs and a third in the loft up top, plus a room off the back to stack the firewood. Outside the door lay forty acres—his father’s fields, his mother’s milk house, the long lane down which he had once driven crops to town by horse and wagon. He had come home, finally, and so had something else. The things we find, we find to be lucky: he put the meteorite in the kitchen, on the hearth beside the woodstove, twenty-five years and a few hundred yards from where he found it.
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How are we supposed to find love? For me, as for many people, this felt like a fraught question when I was single. Love is not like a lost object, after all: we can’t locate it by retracing our steps or thoroughly searching our surroundings. But it is also not like the solution to a problem; we may think about it for a very long time, we may imagine it in vivid detail, but we will never find it inside our own mind. It is something like a missing person—in fact, it is quite literally a missing person—but the search area in which we must look for it is essentially unbounded. It could be waiting at the local coffee shop, or three states away, or on staff at a hospital in Senegal, or at a holiday party you’re not very enthusiastic about attending, forty cold, rainy blocks from home. To make matters worse, in the majority of cases, it was last seen, by you, never.
This is the kind of predicament Meno would have recognized: how are we supposed to find someone we haven’t met and don’t know anything about? Love, before we encounter it, is like an idea we’ve never had before. We may try to fumble our way toward it, but its eventual manifestation is a mystery. This is one of its many delights: love often takes us by surprise, in when and where it shows up and, above all, in who embodies it. But, from the perspective of those who are still searching for romance, it is also a serious problem. Although love is one of the most wonderful things any of us can ever hope to find in life, there is no obvious way to look for it.
Some people, accordingly, believe we shouldn’t even try. For reasons philosophical, practical, or tactical, they hold that actively searching for a partner is pointless—that it makes us seem desperate, that love is never where we go looking for it anyway, that it is most likely to appear when we are happy and fulfilled and busy living life on our own terms. Others believe that finding love, like achieving any other goal, requires effort and rewards dedication: that you should “put yourself out there,” that you should “say yes to everything,” that, by the law of large numbers, enough bad dates—false targets, as it were—will eventually produce a sublime one.