Another Chance

This morning we both left the house at the same time. Warren was headed to his office; I needed to run to court to pick up a fax. When we head out the same direction in different cars, we always make a point of waving as one of us turns off. Usually, there is a shared stoplight or other moment to pull up side by side, roll down the windows, and yell "I love you!" from one lane to the other.

This morning, we didn't quite sync our routes. I turned one block before Warren was thinking about it and while I waved, he drove on.

When I got home, I had am email from him. (We send each other a daily morning email Monday through Friday.) He wrote in part:

I was going to wave to you at William St not knowing you were turning on Winter and I felt bad about that. I thought how I wanted another chance.

I got tears in my eyes just reading it. I answered:

It was clear we missed signals at Winter. I was hurrying to catch you and wave - and then I realized you didn't know I was turning to court. But don't worry about not having enough chances with me: there will be more chances, always, for as long as we are both in this world. Maybe even afterwards. There will be another corner to turn and blow kisses to one another.

Warren's sentence - I thought how I wanted another chance - is sweet and faintly sad. It is haunting me this morning. On the one hand, it was just a missed signal as we drove our separate ways. On the other hand, Warren and I have been about wanting another chance since we were in high school together.

Warren and I "kinda" dated one another the summer after his senior year in high school. Today we would call it "hanging out." Neither of us had the courage to say "I like you A LOT," but we always gravitated towards each other. I out and out adored him. So much so that when he started college and without a word stopped dropping by to go out for ice cream or take me home after a football game, I was devastated.

All I wanted was another chance.

For a long time afterwards, our paths would only very occasionally intersect - a snowball fight at a friend's house, a chance meeting on the OSU campus, a piano recital by his brother. I was always thrown off by these random meetings. And even though I had moved on - to school, to other boyfriends, I always had a little pang when we would meet. After all, it was Warren.

What can I say? He always lit me up. What would have happened if I had had another chance?

When I moved back to my hometown in 1990, Warren was living here with a family and a business and the Symphony. I served on the Symphony board for a term and was legal counsel to the group for a decade. I got to know Warren as more than just the guy I had known in high school. We became good friends and, in the Symphony arena, good colleagues. I respected and admired the man Warren had become.

Our families even socialized together for a brief time until problems in my life brought all socializing with anyone to a halt. I lived through a lot of years that, in looking back, I can only brush the memories away and say "they're in the past now." There were some wonderful moments, especially with my sons. There were a lot of terrible moments that I try not to revisit.

Eventually, painfully, I left my marriage. There were horrific costs to that decision - financial, emotional, physical, personal.

As I constructed a new life for myself and my sons, I continued to run into Warren here and there around town. I was always glad to see him. I was always interested in hearing about his family or the Symphony. What I didn't realize is that his own life was developing major fault lines and fissures in it, a process that only accelerated after his parents died within weeks of one another.

A lot of Life happened to us both in very separate spheres in a very short time. I moved to Cancerland. Before I got through the immigration process, living there wreaked a lot of damage - physical and financial. But moving there also filled me with hope and brought me support. I wanted another chance, any chance at all, to go on living in this amazing world.

In another part of town, Warren's marriage and family life started to crumble much in the way an earth dam fails: some crumbs of dry dirt tumbling down the slope at first, a hairline crack following, and then, finally and terribly, the walls splitting open as the torrent pours through with a roar. Before that final total failure, Warren made the difficult decision to abandon rebuilding it.

The failure of the marriage, like the failing of a dam, left devastation and wreckage - financial, emotional, physical, personal - in its wake.

There are photos of Warren from his prior marriage, as I know there are of me from mine, where he is clearly happy. I'm glad there was that joy, because I've seen the ones in which the pain and hollowness in his eyes burn through the film. They are photos of a man watching the dam he is standing on give way.

When Warren first told me he was interested in me, I was cautious to the point of being wary. Marital matters that needed untangling aside, why me? I was bankrupt, I had a chronic, unpredictable disease, and I was not the same person I was before - professionally, financially, emotionally, or physically. Truly, why me?

Warren said that all he hoped was that he had a chance with me. That was all: just a chance.

That was all it took.

Both of us are still a bit stunned at the wonder of being at this point in our respective lives and being together. Both of us are in awe that all we both wanted was another chance with one another.

And got it.