Ben's Take on the Whole Thing:
It was pretty natural really. We met at a dinner party. Ailish insists it wasn't a set-up. But, really, it was. We met the weekend of Katrina. It was clear from the start. There was something there. At least for Ben. Mikaela? Lord knows whats in that pretty little head of hers...
We did a year's long distance before Mikaela, who'd just bought a house in Washington DC and started a business there, uprooted herself and her two cats, and moved to foggy, beautiful, amazing San Francisco.
Ben, for those who don't know, works at KALW, the little public radio station that could. Mikaela, for those who don't know, is a leadership consultant with OCL.
We enjoy acronyms.
So here we are, through sickness, health, death, happiness, thousands of miles of road and contrails and thousands of dollars in phone bills. As simple as that. |
|
Mikaela's Take on the Whole thing: "I didn't know people would ask how it happened." Ben said after we were engaged, "I never asked that."
So, it is not a story that knew it would be told. Not a story created for anyone but us, in the quiet of an ordinary morning three days before my birthday. We hit the snooze bar, shirking the cool morning air for the comforting warmth undercover. And, he asked. Just like that. And I said yes. Just like that.
So it is with Ben and me - at once ordinary and extraordinary. After we met that soul-shaking Katrina September, he sent me postcards, nearly one a day for some weeks. Each was filled with the life of San Francisco -- overheard smoky bar talk, the cresting waves of the Pacific, and the sounds of that storied city on the bay.
They spoke to me of far more. So one conversation morphed into many - through late nights on long calls, in the pithy brevity of text messages, on weekend jaunts to Tahoe, back East, out West and to Paris, where we shared our affection for the language and the people who speak it.
I moved to San Francisco just about a year ago now. We both have a lot more rollover minutes on our cell phones these days, but we still keep each other up late. And life is extraordinary - even when it's an ordinary Tuesday morning.
|
