The Color of Books
I FELL IN LOVE with my wife when she walked into a room in the fall of 1989. It was a party thrown by a graduate student at the university where I was teaching as a post-doctoral fellow, and I was sitting on the floor playing Trivial Pursuit. The fact that I was sitting matters – I am significantly shorter than my wife, a fact which I managed to conceal when she came over and fortuitously sat down next to me to join our game. I remember we talked for a long time that night about the books we were reading and the books we hoped to write. It’s a conversation that has continued now for going on thirty-five years. Sometimes young people will ask me the secret of a long and happy marriage. I always say the same thing: a good marriage is not just like a good conversation, it simply is a good conversation. Our conversation started that night in 1989. It was not quite, but close, to being love at first sight. I saw her at the door and I must have lit up – I “hinked” as cops might say in...
