Imagine it from the beginning: before myself and my sister, before the house and the gardens and the quiet wedding, before the happy long-lived marriage and my father’s death, before anyone else in the world had ever even imagined they might exist together: my parents held each other in some dark and unknown room and fell from a startling height.

Imagine them! My mother walking down the hallway of the college, still in her twenties, in a pencil skirt and violet blouse—wearing turquoise eyeshadow in stark contrast with her dark brown hair (permed beyond comprehension). It is 1977. There is some undetected but primeval electricity in the air. My dad stares at her ass. He is married and fifteen years older, but he dreams of that ass, in the coming days and weeks and months, as they become closer and closer as friends. He is not exceptionally surprised at this desire; he has lusted (treacherously) for other women since his marriage; he has kissed others; he has not been an ideal husband. But no, no, it is something else this time—something more dangerous, more transformative and it catches him offguard; he finds himself dreaming of her brain: its gray folds and bundled nerves and all the invisible signs and semiotics that pass between their pathways, and he wants to know them. He wants to stay awake all night just talking to her, as if he is the first explorer to come upon some wondrous unimagined world. Valuable, inexhaustible, marvelous, arousing; perpetually beautiful; it is as though a match were struck in the furnace of his soul—a soul that had, until now, cast only a pale anemic light in the cave of some peaceable but ordinary life. But now, now, she laughs and it fills the universe and the sun itself is a whimpering ridiculous flame compared to this—this—affair.

My parents exist together in secret for as long as they can, but it is not enough. My father would tell me later, years later, how wrecked and awful those first destroying days had been when they unlocked the nuclear truth of their love; he told me how his teenage daughter sat on his lap and begged and begged and begged for him to stay. But he had already glimpsed a life of happiness. He had already been carried away. He chose to love my mother. And thirty years later I would watch my parents together and know how much that meant.

• My parents at their wedding
• My favorite picture of them, gray and kissing in a photo booth, a few months before my father’s death
• Our family all together

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