Over time, I would discover other things about C. that reminded me of my father, not all of them on the brilliant-and-charming end of the character spectrum. These include an intermittent but impressive obstinacy; the capacity to intimidate other people, usually although not always by accident; and, in contrast to their overall equilibrium, a short fuse, lit by a kind of flaring pride, in the face of perceived slights. But that day as I sat next to C. on the couch, all those discoveries lay in the future. In the moment, listening to her talk with my father and realizing how similar they were in certain ways, I also realized that this shouldn’t surprise me at all—indeed, that it wouldn’t surprise even people who had never met my father or C. or me. Because this is another theory about how we find love: we recognize it when we come across it because it is familiar, not from before our lifetimes, as Plato thought, but from our earliest days. If it is true that our relationships with our first caregivers shape the romantic choices we make in adulthood, small wonder that I was drawn to someone so stubborn, self-made, independent, devoted, and brilliant.
Among the other things C. and my father had in common—as I’d known since she postponed a date with me to catch an Orioles game—was a love of sports. The morning after the interrogation on the couch, as the four of us walked up to the entrance of a local diner where we were headed for brunch, she said, matter-of-factly, “There’s LeBron James.” Sure enough, there he was, emerging enormously from the restaurant next door. This was after he had returned from the Miami Heat and before he left again to join the Lakers, during that long, beautiful run when he transformed the Cavaliers from one of the worst teams in the league to NBA champions, finally ending the half-century-long losing streak of every professional sports team in town. Because C. and I were visiting just for the weekend, and for the momentous reason of introducing her to my parents, it hadn’t occurred to me to try to do anything touristy with her—take her to the art museum, say, or the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But seeing LeBron that morning was the most Cleveland thing that could possibly happen in Cleveland; it was like heading into a patisserie in Paris and watching the Eiffel Tower walk out.
In the diner, C. and my father commenced kibitzing about sports. He ribbed her for stealing the Cleveland Browns and rebranding them as the Ravens; she countered by simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for franchises in Baltimore (“the Western Shore,” as people on the Eastern Shore call the rest of Maryland and people from there do not) and pointing out that, circa 1996, the Browns were not valuable enough for the alleged stealing to count as more than petty theft. Around the edges of all this, we ordered lunch, and when the sandwiches and coleslaw and pickles were distributed and the ketchup requested and the waters and coffees refilled, C. asked my parents how they had met.
I had heard the story countless times, of course. When she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, my mother had begun dating a fellow student—as fate would have it, Lee Larson, my father’s best friend from back in Detroit. When they were still just kids, Lee and my dad had made a solemn pact that if either of them ever started to get serious about a girl, they would introduce her to the other for approval. Lee was a man of his word, and so, when he found himself captivated by my mother a decade later, he arranged a lunch. Whatever my father might have thought of the match turned out to be irrelevant. By the end of the meal, my mother knew that, of the two men at the table, the one she wanted to marry was the one she had just met.
As a kid, I’d always loved this story, not least because it had the thrilling whiff of scandal about it. (Albeit of the comic, all’s-well-that-ends-well variety: “Uncle Lee,” as I grew up calling him, found his own wonderful woman to marry, moved to a town thirty minutes from my childhood home, and, as long as my father lived, remained his closest friend.) But sitting with C. across from my parents as they jointly recounted the tale—interrupting, expanding upon, and editing each other’s versions—I suddenly registered it very differently, the way I might have if she and I had been having brunch with two friends who had only recently started dating. Out of nowhere, it struck me that my parents had always felt as I did now; for the first time, their history snapped into focus as a love story.
To be clear, I had always known that my mother and father loved each other. It was impossible not to know that; they were open and tender and, in my father’s case, sometimes cheerfully risqué in their affection. I even knew that, all those years later, they were still in love with each other, one of those lucky couples for whom time had worn away the rougher edges while polishing the core. If anything, my father had grown more expressive about his love over the years, more openly grateful to my mother. She was, I understood, his rock, his comfort, his right hand and heaven knows his left brain, his fashion consultant, his ethics committee, and the most gorgeous woman he’d ever met. And I knew that my father was my mother’s sunlight and starlight, her best friend, her all-time best decision, her Library of Alexandria, her occasional pain in the neck, and the chief reason she laughed so much every day. But I had nothing to transpose all that knowledge onto until I met C., no way to imagine how their relationship had felt from the inside. Now, sitting beside her, looking across at my mother and father, forty-eight years after they first sat down and looked across at each other, I was suddenly, irrationally happy for them.
And for me, too: I was so very lucky, I realized. In another sense as well—this one thanks to both of my parents—I’d recognized love when I’d found it because I had seen it from my earliest days. Without ever having to think about it, I had always known what it would look like: loyal, stable, affectionate, funny, forbearing, enduring. My sister, in adulthood, once put this very beautifully. Our parents, she said, had given us a love of ideas, and also the idea of love.
* * *
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The idea of love is one thing; the practice is something else. Consider, for instance, the stupidest fight that C. and I have ever had, which was about whether you are more likely to see a bear while out hiking or out backpacking. It may or may not help to know that we were, in fact, out hiking at the time, in Shenandoah National Park, and that we had, in fact, just seen a bear. It was, as bears are, very obvious, pale of snout and sporting a shaggy Bon Jovi hairstyle and swaying tranquilly through the woods mere yards from the trail. It was also magnificent, the way wild animals spotted in the actual wild always are, and the argument was not its fault.
We didn’t begin fighting right away. In the moment, we were busy feeling lucky to be outside on a beautiful day, in a lovely and apparently megafauna-filled forest. We discussed the bear for a while once it had disappeared among the trees—its slightly comic shape, its utter indifference to us, the way it hauled its grandeur around like any mundane thing—and then the conversation, like the trail we were on, looped away. But sometime after that, we began talking again about animal sightings, and I made an offhand comment about how funny it was, after all the backpacking trips in bear country where I had assiduously carried my food in canisters or hung it high up in trees, that I had finally seen a bear up close when we were just out hiking for the day.