“Was that your friend Bill Shakespeare?” my youngest son, Alex, then six, asks after my husband, Steve, hangs up the phone.
If that seems like a crazy question from a child, it was par for the course in my household, because it was words that wooed me, words that won me, and words that keep us – the entire family – in thrall.
From the very beginning, in fact.
That we met on February 22, my Grandma Clara’s birthday, my parents’ wedding day and my Bar Mitzvah day on my mom’s and dad’s 22nd anniversary, must be pure coincidence, right? We chose our wedding day, June 10th, randomly; it turned out to be my grandparents’ wedding day nearly 70 years earlier. Another coincidence… unless one accepts that beshert operates in strange and mysterious ways.
He once asked me, “Does it bother you that I spend so much time inside my head?” And hand to G-d, my answer was, “I’m sorry, what did you say? I wasn’t listening.” Now if that isn’t beshert…
We settled on his idea to prank mobile users into thinking they were getting a call from Ashton Kutcher himself. And for the next week or so, the two of us “partnered” on a project that would go on to garner media attention from national publications large and small; an April Fools’ Day prank that did, in fact, fool millions of people over the course of one, silly day that spring.
Most of our adventures have been wonderful. We’ve met and become friends with great people, seen beautiful things, and have become part of people’s lives. (Some adventures weren’t so good; accidents, hospital stays, illnesses, and sometimes boredom and culture shock.)
For the first hour or so, it seemed like he was putting on airs, so I didn’t feel particularly interested. But at some point, he suddenly dropped the act. In retrospect, he remembers feeling that he was too tired to keep it going. He told me his mother’s memorial service was the next day, and he showed me the eulogy he had written. It was not a normal date. And I’ve never gotten to know someone so quickly. I don’t remember how I felt or how I reacted to the news of his mother’s death, but Tom remembers I took his hand.
