The Gods Blew Us Apart. The Saints Blew Us Back.
A true love story about losing things, finding things, and the love that was never really lost.
I am on the floor again.
This is where I end up when something is truly lost, when the drawers and the files and all the reasonable places have all failed me. On the floor of my office, surrounded by my 53 saints, the religious prints, the rosary beads, the little hand-painted faces that have been watching over me from every shelf for years.
I am pulling canvas boxes from the lower shelves and going through them again, for the ninth time, maybe the tenth, the way you search for something when logic has left the building and what remains is determination and the inability to accept it’s gone.
Saint Anthony knows me well. We go way back, he and I. This is an Italian family tradition, talking to him, calling him when things go missing. He’s like a friend who has your number, knows why you’re calling again, and picks up anyway. My mother did it. My sister does it. We are women who lose things and know who to call. As my dad would say, “I gotta guy.”
He has come through for me before. A diamond earring that had gone so completely lost among the bags of Christmas wrap that I’d stopped expecting to see it again, but he found it. Things I’d given up on, things I’d grieved. He finds them. So when I sat down on that floor, among the saints, I wasn’t performing a prayer so much as continuing one that has been going on in this family for generations.
Saint Anthony, I said, out loud, the way I always do. You know what I’m looking for. You know what it means to me. Please.
It was a poem Michael wrote for me on one of our anniversaries, the way he does every year. And this one had the words dragons beware in it. I can’t fully explain why those two words broke me open the way they did, except that as someone brought up in an Italian family, we understand protection as love. We understand a man who would stand between you and the fire. Dragons beware. He would fight them for me. Every last one.
I have kept each and every thing he has ever written, the notes he puts beside a freshly peeled tangerine, arranged in a circle for my breakfast before I’m even awake. The cut-out hearts he writes on and leaves scattered on the table. And then there’s the love letter written on the back of a photograph of an unknown patient’s colon polyps, left on my windshield when he didn't have time to run inside and grab a notepad and instead grabbed whatever was in the car. He is a gastroenterologist. A love note on the back of a polyp photograph is the most romantic thing in the world, because it means he can't wait. It means I am the thought that interrupts everything else.
All of it kept. All of it safe. Except the poem with the dragons.
I searched for this poem for the past two or three years, in drawers, in files, inside books. And as our anniversary approached, I did what I do when I have run out of all options. I asked Saint Anthony again: Please. I need a sign. Help me find it.
I am that kind of woman and I come by it honestly. My father wore an Italian horn around his neck, the gold cornicello, because you don’t take chances. My Irish mother would scream if you opened an umbrella in the house, would not allow a hat or a pair of shoes on a bed, and if her palms started itching, she’d quickly check if it was the right or the left one because the left meant she’d be receiving money and the right meant she’d be losing it. We were people who understood that the universe communicates, that objects carry meaning, and that absence can be a message.
I almost lost him once to Valley Fever, a diagnosis that turned our world from tranquil to terrifying and landed him in ICU for three months. So when the poem went missing, the very large superstitious part of me, which is most of me, worried. Did it mean I would lose him to something even worse than Valley Fever? Would he die in a car accident? I tend to spin.
So every day, I said my prayer to Saint Anthony in hopes he’d have time to listen.
And then my son, Andy, mentioned the Wayback Machine. He was visiting and it came up in conversation, not because he knew I was looking for anything, not because I’d told him about the poem. He simply mentioned that all of my old writing might still be there. The site I’d taken down years ago, the one that held stories from before I met Michael, stories written when my mother was dying, stories from after, all of it preserved somewhere in the architecture of the internet, whether I’d wanted it to be or not. Sometimes I’d published things Michael had written for me there too.
I wasn’t looking for the poem. I just thought there might be some story ideas worth revisiting. It was all there, at least one hundred stories from my past. I copied and pasted about five into a Google Doc and started reading with plans to revisit the site and copy and paste more when I had the time.
And there it was.
Dragons beware.
I don’t have the words to explain exactly what it felt like. Saint Anthony comes through in his own time, sometimes minutes, sometimes days or even weeks, depending, I suppose, on how many lost souls like me he’s managing at once. The diamond earring took nearly three weeks and then appeared miraculously on my bedroom floor after already sweeping every inch of it. But this? It had been hiding in an archive the entire time, and it took a saint and the suggestion of my son, who is kind of a saint himself, to find it.
It felt like proof. Like the universe lifting its head and saying: You see? Nothing is lost. Not the things that matter. Not ever.
Do you believe in kismet? In serendipity? In the idea that some people are simply meant to find each other? Soul mates? That the distance between them is never really the point, that the point is always the finding?
We do.
Michael believes he remembers me from before we ever met. He recalls a little blonde girl on Brighton Beach, years and years ago, the kind of memory that doesn’t quite make sense but won’t let go. I went to Brighton Beach as a child, with my parents. Whether it was me or not, whether it could possibly have been me, I don’t know. What I do know is that he has that picture of me on his desk and it feels true to him.
I have my own. I was a young girl on a moving walkway at the World’s Fair in Flushing, New York, the city where he lived, being carried slowly past the Pietà, Michelangelo’s marble so luminous it seemed lit from within. There was this nerdy older boy with black horn rimmed glasses. We locked eyes, the way kids sometimes do. I have thought about that boy for decades, and I’m convinced it was him. I also have that photo on my shelf, sitting inside a souvenir cup from the New York World’s Fair.
Before this divine intervention of sorts, we lived in the wrong loves. Both of us. And then, at 47, I fell deeply, madly in love.
There is a moment I return to, when I want to remember the exact instant I knew.
We had already said yes to each other, already chosen each other, but there is knowing and then there is knowing. I was sitting on the bed, folding his sweater. It sounds so small. I finished folding it, lifted it to my face, and I breathed in his scent, Ralph Lauren Polo.
That sign. This was it. He was it. I was done.
I will embarrassingly admit that I cannot walk past the men’s cologne counter in a department store without stopping and picking up the Ralph Lauren green Polo bottle, bringing it to my nose and feeling something I can only describe as swooning.
He has his own moment. It was our first trip to New York together and we stayed at the Paramount Hotel, a small room but beautifully artsy, the kind of place that has personality instead of space. He went out to buy the New York Times and I was, truthfully, just happy to have the bathroom to myself for a few minutes. I have IBS, Italian Bowel Syndrome. It tends to flare up when I eat pasta, and when in New York, eating pasta is a requirement.
He came back sooner than I expected and I said, back already? Casual. Unbothered. And something in him shifted. He told me later that he had braced himself when he walked back in, that in his past life he had lived on a short leash and that coming back too soon or too late or wrong in any way would result in a fight or an inquisition. But I was just sitting there, on the bed, minus a stomach ache, just glad to see him.
He told me it was the first time in his life he had felt this at ease with a woman. That he could simply be himself. That he didn’t have to perform or explain or become something he wasn’t. He was just him, and it was enough.
And then, on that same trip, he got to be a hero. Not the medical kind, which he does every day, but the other kind. The kind he hadn't felt in a very long time.
I needed a new suitcase. My sister and my best friend had extracted a promise from me before I left: Please buy yourself a proper piece of luggage, for Christ’s sake,” my best friend said. So I promised.
I found one and called my sister from the store, very excited. She knows me well. I’m more than happy to spend money on clothes and shoes and handbags, but suitcases or household items? Not my thing.
Where are you? she said. Tell me the truth. I told her I was at Macy’s in the luggage section. Where are you really? she asked again. I was at Big Lots, a discount store that sells overstocks and damaged goods. I told her I’d found a red Samsonite suitcase. She asked, “Are you sure it’s not Shamsonyte?”
I bought it anyway.
When it came around the baggage carousel at JFK it was in two pieces. My underwear and bras were making their own leisurely trip around the belt, greeting fellow travelers, seeing the sights. Michael handled everything, went straight to the airline clerk, made sure it was replaced, and had a new one delivered to the hotel. I was in awe. He was calm, capable and unfazed. He told me later it made him feel like a hero.
That’s the thing about the right love. It doesn’t ask you to be someone else. It just takes you, the woman with the Shamsonyte suitcase and the man who just wanted to buy a newspaper without bracing for impact, and it hands you back the version of yourself you’d either lost or have never been allowed to be.
From the very beginning of us, we held each other and swayed. Not at weddings or formal occasions, just everywhere, anywhere, for no reason. In the kitchen, in the living room, on sidewalks. Friends and family would watch us and smile. And so Sway, by Dean Martin, became the soundtrack of our lives. It was played at our wedding.
And let me tell you about our wedding, which was not just a wedding. It was an opera, a love story performed live, and we planned it that way on purpose.
We took over Il Cielo in Beverly Hills, the whole jewel box of it, the kind of place that makes you forget you're in Los Angeles and convinces you that you've been transported to a villa in Tuscany. In the front garden, where twinkling lights are threaded through twisted vines along the garden walls, a three-piece ensemble played. In the back courtyard where the roof opens to the sky, I walked down an aisle of flowers on my son's arm toward my person as the opera singers who played Mimì and Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann’s La Bohème sang Quando me’n vo’.
Not wedding singers. The real ones. Because when you are walking toward the love of your life, the music should be large enough to hold what you’re feeling. And what I was feeling was enormous.
I had spent months collecting vintage handkerchiefs, lace ones, embroidered ones, tiny monogrammed ones that belonged to women I’d never known. I placed them in a basket at the entrance for our guests, because I knew there would be crying. I am a woman who plans for the crying and they needed every single one.
Our invitations featured Marc Chagall's The Three Candles on the front, and my dress, an open back held together by a single satin ribbon threaded through lace, was my version of it. Flowers and framed posters of our favorite operas adorned the tables. Each guest left with our playlist on a CD and a black and white cookie in a pink bakery box, a homage to our city. New York. The cotton string was tied with a tag that read La Dolce Vita, the sweet life, the life we planned to live.
He is my prince. My king. I said so in my vows, and I meant it. He calls me his Sophia. He recited his vows in English and Italian, and he spoke of other lifetimes, of distance and time, and of true love. He said that maybe one day when I was eight and he was eighteen, the gods blew us apart only to find each other again, now. I believe him.
Every year on our anniversary, we make a playlist of all the songs that were the soundtrack of our life that year. The song that was playing when something wonderful happened, the song that broke our hearts because of illness or loss, the one that somehow became ours for those particular twelve months. On our anniversary, we get in the car, we press play, and we drive back to Il Cielo.
We don’t always make it without pulling over.
There are years when a song comes on and we just look at each other, and that’s it. Two grown people pulled over on the side of the road, completely undone by a song. The year he survived Valley Fever, Dusty Springfield sang If you go away on this summer day, then you might as well take the sun away. We didn’t say a word. We just sat there. Or Billy Joel's New York State of Mind that takes us back to the year we moved to Manhattan and a state of mind we often find ourselves in. Or, of course, Sway.
Puddles. Every time.
Today is our 21st anniversary. This morning, like every year, we’ll drink bellinis, the way we did at our wedding, and we’ll watch the wedding video. We’ll cry. We always do. Twenty-one years later and that day still wrecks us.
He wrote me something, a list of everything he wants to always do for me. Here’s just a few: Hold an umbrella over you in the rain. Hold your hand when you fly and when you don’t fly. Slip money in your wallet when you’re not looking. Make you laugh. Say I love you more than once a day. Carry any package that is too heavy for you. Dance with you in the kitchen and the dining room and wherever. Hum the songs you sing and whistle. Cook for you. Never go to bed without you. Kiss you a lot. Take you back to Italy. Fill the house with tulips and yellow roses. Listen to you tell me about your day. Give you the half of the bagel with the seeds on top. And then, at the very end of the list, three words:
Marry you again.
I would, in a heartbeat. With the opera singers and the vintage handkerchiefs and the black and white cookies. Or in a field with flowers in my hair. Or barefoot on a beach. Or even at a courthouse, like Carrie and Big, wearing Manolos, obviously.
Don’t settle. That’s what I want to leave you with on this anniversary morning, with the bellinis and the wedding video and the poem I lost and found again.
There is a film called Dreams for an Insomniac whose poster hangs on my office wall. The main character, Frankie, named after Sinatra, has a line I have never forgotten. When it came time to say my vows, I used hers:
There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That real love exists. The can’t-live-without-you, pull-over-on-the-side-of-the-road, gods-blew-us-apart-only-to-find-each-other-again love. It exists and you deserve it and it’s worth every wrong turn it takes to get there.
We still sway. We still pull over. I still breathe him in when I hold his things.
And his poem, the one with the dragons, is safe now, right where it belongs. He would fight them for me. Every last one. And this is how I know:
Toni, my beloved
You are the woman who
Gave me back my life
Looked into my soul and found truth
Purged my demons and made me whole
You are the woman who, hating hospitals
Crawled into my bed after surgery,
Amidst the tubing and the monitors and the urinal on the bedrail
And slept for nights beside me
You are the woman who is mother to all who know you
A duck with all her ducklings who grow and spread their wings
And fly off to do great things.
Andy is right that you are the most loyal of friends and the most
Protective of family.
You are my friend and lover and sweetheart and wife and Queen and Princess.
You are the castle of our kingdom and I defend it against all, to the death.
Dragons beware that this place is sacred and protected.
I am in love as never before
And have never been happier than
Now.
Happy anniversary, my love. Twenty-one years ago today, two singers from La Bohème watched me walk toward you, and I thought what I still think every single day.
You are my king. My prince. My person.
The Gods blew us apart. The saints, the angels, the universe, and every force I have ever lit a candle for or whispered a prayer to, blew us back.
You bring the bellinis. I’ll bring the tissues. Let’s go remember.
