    |
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
It's 3 o'clock on a Miami Beach morning. It's our pre-first date. We were scheduled for a real first date the next day, when he had called to say he was in the neighborhood on business, could he stop by? Fifteen hours after his call, we are in his car in my driveway. He tells me he loves me. "How could you know that?" I ask. He says, "All I know is that this is what I am feeling right now, and so I have to say it in case I never have the chance." This is the man who showed up at my door that afternoon with banana peels. Now the proverbial bomb had been dropped, he had said "those three words". And for the first time in my life, they made sense. Three weeks earlier, I had received a phone call from a features writer at the Miami Herald. He had written a piece on Slam Poetry and had heard from his editors that I was the "local authority" so he wanted me to assist in his fact-checking as it went to print. "So," I asked, "If I'm the local authority, why didn't you talk to me when you were writing this piece?" To make up for this glaring error, this writer dropped one sentence into the two-page Arts Section cover story about our upcoming Slam and its featured poet for the world to read. The next weekend I was readying our performance space for that Slam. I was in a bad mood, and didn't do my usual "coif-ing" as MC. I skipped the bright red lipstick, skipped changing out of my schleppy old Birkenstocks, and got right up on stage in an old ripped cotton sweater from college. I didn't care what I looked like or what anybody thought. There was a certain new peace in my life, some new unaccounted for contentment and calm. As the audience was streaming in, I was chatting outside with a friend. There was a tap on my shoulder and I turned around. I don't remember what I physically saw or heard at that moment, but I saw colors and heard music - neither of which were happening in real space or real time. "You must be Jenni." And I knew this was the person with whom I was going to spend the rest of my life. We chatted briefly about the Slam, during the show we had some back and forth and afterwards, we shook left hands and chatted about being New York Jews in South Florida, and about both being: Capricorns, youngest children, educated in Northeastern private colleges, born in the sixties and so on. He had my card, I had his, and we parted with a hug as he headed back to Broward County (Ft. Lauderdale area) where he was living - and where one fateful day earlier in the week, he had forgone Ft. Lauderdale's major daily paper in exchange for a Miami Herald with his morning coffee and cigarette and read the sentence the writer put in about our Slam. A week later, I received a letter at work. The letter - clearly personal - kept popping to the top of my pile as I worked my way through business mail, sorting out junk mail. The letter was from the left-handed Capricorn poet from Broward. The letter asked me to accompany him to a Nine Inch Nails concert. I wasn't particularly interested in Nine Inch Nails, but I called and accepted. Over seven years later, we are married almost six years - the newspaper clipping is part of our Ketubah, as are pieces of the envelope from the letter. We have shared 7 homes in 4 cities - not including two temporary homes in our current city. A cat adopted us during our two years in Jerusalem - our last city - and changed our lives. We have commuted together, been unemployed together, driven cross-country together (with the cat), traveled internationally together (with the cat), lived through crises together - personal and professional challenges, losses, family emergencies, and terrorism. When the going gets tough - and it naturally does - all we need to do is remember that moment, on a Miami Beach sidewalk, outside a bar-turned-performance space, because of a chance newspaper experience - that we met each other because it was Beshert. Beshert is this: A cosmic (or Godly) reckoning of what is meant to be, that every person has a soulmate with whom he or she eventually crosses paths; Beshert is a partnership destined to be. We are so confident that we were meant for each other, that we know we have to work, grow, compromise, evolve, and redefine. We have to make it work because it was meant to be - and as we grow - and even change - it feels even more right, more meant to be. We still have moments in which we are delighted by the Beshert of our partnership - the "of course"-ness of the fluid and obvious intimacy we share. The memory of that Beshert moment is also all I needed early on: to respond to his initial letter without fear; to hear his words when he first told me he loved me; to completely "get" the notion of marriage the first time he brought it up. The other night, we hosted a gathering for a local non-profit organization. The associate director approached me to share her enthusiasm for our home and its décor. "And I love what you two have," she said. I proceeded to talk about how I've collected my art and furniture for many years. "No, she said, "I mean your love and the way it fills this house." Jenni Person lives in Los Angeles with her partner, Chaim Lieberman, and their tail-less Manx cat. Chaim still arrives with banana peels and Jenni still wears that sweater from college. They subscribe to three newspapers.
|
||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
