This epic romance begins with a phone call out of the blue; I hadn’t seen Desire’ since high school. She transferred out to New Trier in Wilmette soon after. Something about me in the two months we went out during the 8th grade must have left an impression—always felt I was damn good at kissing; but more than likely it was something else.
“Do you still play guitar and sing?” She asked early on in that fateful phone call.
Of course I did: after baseball ceased being an option, music was the only thing; I decided at 17 there would be nothing else. From there a University Of Iowa dance-major-dropout with bad knees, and a songwriting dreamer rode the highs and lows of passion’s thrills as the lingering doubt that follows it around kept prodding, “Is this right? Is this not folly personified?” At times notions of true love gushed from one eye to another mutually deep and profound, until suddenly it seemed she had come to her senses.
Four months removed from the call, Desire’ went back to Iowa in November. By February we had an apartment together in Chicago. Two weeks into that she got pregnant. There was love, a romantic connection, shared interest culturally, politically even. It all happened so fast, we were just 23 and 24 when Aubrey was born.
On July 11, 1987 I got a phone call, somewhere in June 1996 the marriage was officially over if not legally. In between I broke her heart and we got back together; on July 11, 1992 we married with our 3 and half year-old daughter as a flower-girl; moved to Madison, WI that September (first time I lived out of the neighborhood) and in April ’93 to Nashville, TN so brother Chris and I could sell songs; finally in October of 1995 Desire’ asked me to move out.
That’s just the bare-bones of it. There are plenty of “whys” and “what fors”: things she and I could have done better, been more honest about—with ourselves and each other; lots of stories funny and sad, telling and leading one in circles. It gave us, and the world, Aubrey—that alone made it all essential let alone worth the journey. I don’t know much for certain, but there was love.