Category Archives: Romance

Happy 20th Anniversary to Me (And Us)

There’s more to it than hair; but  . . . .

In 2003, Wendy Michener, a mid-life architecture student from Raleigh, joined the Board of Quaker House in Fayetteville NC. Soon she was Clerk of the House & Grounds Committee (there were no other volunteers).

As Director since early 2002, I had seen from early on that Quaker House had many needs for house repairs and renovations. After all, it was built in the 1920s, and was once home to an up-and-coming young lawyer named Terry Sanford (and was now part of Fayetteville’s “historic district.”

But I had been candid with the Board that– unlike several earlier Directors, who had done many repairs on their own–I was not a “handyman,” DIY type. Some matters could be ignored (and had been for years), but others could not: the roof leaked, and leaked more with each serious rainstorm. Pipes froze and flooded a semi-basement room. Old bricks were loose or crumbling. Et cetera.

Needs such as these brought Wendy to visit often, to poke around.

And over time we struck up many conversations, which, by the end of 2003 were on the edge of courting.

In November of 2003, the house  heating system failed, and it was cold. We sent out an urgent appeal, donations came in, and soon a new system was installed: Wendy spent much time managing the technical details.

However, on January 27, the night before the new system cranked up, one last gasp of the bunch of space heaters we had used in the interim set some wires smoldering in the attic.

The fire department came and saved us from any significant damage, but it was a close call, and exposed to city inspectors that much of the wiring in the house was of the 1920s, cloth-wrapped, highly inflammable vintage, and required immediate replacement. (Lots more renovations were to follow.)

few years ago . . .

After the shock of that near miss, Wendy stayed the night in the guest room; and the next morning, she reached out her hand . . .

And we have been an item since, after Fayetteville here in Durham. As of today (January 28, 2024) it’s twenty years and counting…

And yes, that rumor is true: I’ve been bringing her flowers the whole time.

 

 

 

Quote of the Day: Tom Friedman on the Top Two Crises

[NOTE: Tom Friedman interrupts his New York Times column today, which is about Ukraine & Israel, to quote a jibe he’s hearing often these days]:

Hey, Friedman, all you seem to write about these days is Ukraine and Israel. Don’t you have anything else to say? Continue reading Quote of the Day: Tom Friedman on the Top Two Crises

Quaker Book Review: “The Living Remnant” Rides Again

 

The Living Remnant & Other Quaker Tales. By “KKK,” (Edith Florence O’Brien.) Published by Headley Brothers in UK, 1900.

A Friend came across this book and passed along a link. It’s a series of four related stories about a tightly-knit (i. e., very insular) British Quaker meeting community, in about 1875. The “tales” portray, in sequence: an old-fashioned courtship; the subsequent wedding; the final dissolution of a stubbornly backward-looking Quaker faction, fixated on a version of the faith that time has quietly but remorselessly passed by; and then closes with the prospect of possible renewal as well as change.

Continue reading Quaker Book Review: “The Living Remnant” Rides Again

Religious Groups Face Off For & Against Senate Same Sex Marriage Bill

October 13, 2014, outside the Cumberland County NC Courthouse, the day same sex marriage became legal there.

[NOTE: The news here is not so much the Senate’s passage of the same sex marriage bill, but the big shift in its denominational support: the switch of the Mormon church (aka LDS) to supporting it,  after decades of being a pillar of opposition.

This carefully modulated change deserves further explication. As the article details, Mormon officials say they will keep their anti-same sex marriage doctrine, but now accept the practice as a cultural/legal reality. Continue reading Religious Groups Face Off For & Against Senate Same Sex Marriage Bill