So it fell to another woman to endure the arduous, arguably unrewarding work of debachelorifying a guy so undomestic the Seattle Fire Department once filed an official complaint about my office as a fire hazard: "TIM'S OFFICE: REMOVE FLAMMABLE DEBRIS."
Another scene, another breakup: Manhattan in 1994. After seven years, she wearied of waiting for a wedding ring and gave me that old, familiar boot-in-the-butt sensation. I pulled my socks up and went out visiting.
The Wieckings, before the shock of Steve.
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One night I phoned my first college sweetheart. We'd chatted a few times since she'd relocated to Brooklyn, but we weren't tight and had different circles. Last I'd heard, she was basically engaged; but she was still living alone and said, "Sure, come on over." Turned out she wasn't engaged, though there was a suitor, an acclaimed composer she'd met at the MacDowell Colony, who wanted her to move to Boston. His bachelor problem was the opposite of mine—he was so neat he rearranged his cushions and vacuumed the house after anyone visited, and he didn't want her to move in with him, just to the neighborhood, but please, not too close to his cushions.
She was wowed when I arrived with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne, unaware that I almost never didn't bring Veuve Cliquot to social occasions. I stayed the night, and pretty much every night thereafter. She moved into my place after a ruckus with her malevolently mad landlady. It was a fabulous loft, dangerous: The day she moved out, a large chunk of concrete fell off the building and put a hole in the roof of the car just before she got into it. The landlord's lawyer argued in court that either someone carried the concrete to the roof and hurled it at her car, or the concrete wafted over from another building on the block. What are the odds?
Better than the odds that this would happen: We got married 25 years after we first met, almost to the day.
Tim Appelo
For Your Eyes Only
How many of us look to marry someone who'll make our lives easier? Someone rich or connected, someone who offers comfort, someone who balances what we lack? In some ways, Jackie and P.J. McCraw seem to fit the complementary pattern: Around the dining-room table of their North Seattle house, their personalities form a combined picture of warmth and humor, shared but distinct intelligence, modesty and bullheaded determination. But Jackie and P.J., both blind, took the farthest thing from the easy route, a marriage of different skin colors and common challenge.
"My family was real opposed" to the union, says Jackie, who grew up in Spokane, "because of the race issue and the blind issue. They wanted me to marry a sighted person, someone who'd protect me and keep me safe. It has been more difficult, I won't deny that."
In 28 years of marriage, Jackie and P.J. have lived in Australia (where they got married), traveled through Asia, and raised three sighted kids—two biological daughters and one adopted son. ("We'd pin bells on their backs when they were babies," says P.J., "and if it was too quiet for too long, we'd check on them.")
Fixed up by the owner of the Spud Nut doughnut shop in the U District in the late '60s—when P.J. was working on his doctorate in geology and Jackie was working for Washington's Department of Health Services, teaching old people how to cope with declining vision—Jackie and P.J. say that in some ways the blindness they share has saved them from some of the difficulties of a "mixed" marriage. "There's a lot of tug-of-war that goes on in sighted-blind couples," says Jackie. "The sighted person feels put-upon, and to some extent, that's true." "It's so much harder for people who go blind later in life," says P.J. "Very few marriages survive that. The roles change—it's a major social upheaval."
Yet the common ground of blindness only goes so far. "What makes our relationship work is we consider each other to be best friends," says P.J. "As long as we keep accepting each other as individuals, and as a couple, I think we'll be all right."
Mark D. Fefer
