In 1972, I was a working girl at United Technologies in Sunnyvale. Also working there was a young engineer who lived in San Francisco and went skiing every weekend – very attractive attributes in a future boyfriend! It didn’t hurt that he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio. Obviously I didn’t know this then since Mr. DiCaprio wouldn’t be born for a couple more years yet.
There was just one problem with this young engineer. He was so focused on his work I could have walked into his office with my hair on fire, and he wouldn’t have glanced up from his desk until he’d completed numerous complicated calculations. Even then, he’d be thinking ahead to his next task.
It was pretty wondrous, then, when he called me out of the blue one evening and asked me for a date.
We got along. I loved his dry sense of humor and innate kindness. He said I brought him out of his shell.
Two years later he decided to leave his San Francisco apartment with the gorgeous view and buy a home in the Santa Cruz mountains. And he wanted me to move there with him. Trouble is, even though by 1974 things had changed in terms of couples living together, I wasn’t too keen on this plan. My mother would have been even less so. I reluctantly told him I didn’t think it was a good idea.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we’d better get married then.” Yep, that was the proposal. Not exactly the dream proposal I’d always envisioned, but I’d learned that many things in life are different than what we believed when we were young.
That house in the mountains became our first home and home to our first baby daughter a couple of years later. Then a move to San Jose and another baby daughter, and suddenly we were a family.
Over time I’ve learned love can mean many different things including driving half the night to pick me up in Long Beach because I was sick and had hurt my knee when I was living there temporarily to help my daughter and her hubby with their new baby. And then, with no rest, turning around and driving me all the way back home.
After 40 years (and four grandchildren), I’ve learned this man has my back. And for that, he gets my heart.
