In my mid-30s, I was a self-employed art director specializing in book publishing. I lived in Manhattan and rented a summer cottage on Fire Island. My friend Nancy met a man with a sailboat and made a deal. She would invite him to join her houseguests for dinner and offered him a pre-dinner shower, if he would take her sailing the next day.
That was how I met Bernie Mayer.
The following weekend, Bernie invited me for cocktails and I declined because I assumed he was involved with Nancy. Bernie informed me of the “deal” and began to talk. Suddenly, about 10 p.m., Bernie realized what time it had become and I was alerted to the fact that I had four people in my cottage waiting for me to serve dinner!
Rushing back to the cottage — Bernie too — I explained to a very angry, hungry group of people how I had gotten lost in conversation having discovered that we had so many things in common, especially our values. Early in the conversation, Bernie had told me how, as an undergraduate, realizing he had a case of beer in the trunk of his car, he turned himself in to the College Ethics Committee. It had happened accidentally, but it was against college rules. Hearing this, I had become hyper-alert, thinking to myself, “Here is a man I could fall in love with.”
The angry, hungry people forgave me and we included Bernie in our meal and conversation. Each one came over to whisper, “Invite me to the wedding!”
We met in the summer of 1968 and were married in March 1969. Next March, we will have been married for 46 years. We have a wonderful son born in 1971 and two handsome grandsons.
When we met, Bernie was an executive for a Fortune 500 company. He had extensive vacation time, but constraints on availability of vacation time. We took a romantic, seven-day vacation in March, arms embraced around each other’s backs while Bernie taught me how to snorkel in Jamaica’s coral reef. The following September, we traveled for a week in each of Capri, Positano and Venice. Dismayed that I was visiting Italy but not seeing Rome or Florence, Bernie added an artist’s trip for me alone to a week in each city. My mother sighed, “She finally gets married but spends part of her honeymoon without her husband! Who ever heard of such behavior?”
My mother met my father when she was 15 and he was 16. They married when she turned 21 and no longer needed her parent’s permission. They couldn’t afford a honeymoon. My father never completed elementary school and mother dropped out of Hunter College to marry my father. Bernie and I were both full scholarship students and Bernie than went on to earn an MBA from Harvard. I went on to study sculpture and printmaking. My parents never understood why we believed education and shared values are a good foundation for marriage.
The longest time we have been separated were the two weeks I spent in Rome and Florence.
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