I’d never seen Amy cry so hard in our newly formed bond. She was so emotionally fraught, wanting so badly to fulfill this dream but knowing that the practicality of her parents’ advice was spot-on. Our final decision was arrived at through many tears and conversations; we practiced our list-making prowess, wrote out the pros and cons on paper, and took a deep dive into what the consequences of staying home meant for both of our careers.
In the end, we chose Chicago. We chose home. We chose family.
And we grew, individually and as a couple, from the whole experience.
We never looked back, and one by one we checked off marriage goals and ideas to help keep us moving forward.
Keep sex fun. No problem there. End of discussion.
Reading>TV. We deliberately never, ever had a TV in our bedroom. Amy’s nightstand was always stacked with the books she devoured. I read every night too; but unlike Amy, I was always out cold after a couple of paragraphs. I’d invariably wake up sometime during the night with the book perched on my chest, still held in my hands. Years later, when my insomnia kicked in, I developed the habit of waking up, climbing out of bed with my book, and settling in to read in the barber chair I kept in the corner of our bedroom until fatigue finally kicked in.
Whenever we sign something “Amy & Jason,” we both sign our name. Absolutely. Literally every single time.
To, at some point (hopefully soon), work together, have our own business. Life is too short and we love being together too much to spend 9–5 apart every day. The nine-to-five thing wasn’t very realistic, it turned out, with both of us hard at work on our full-time careers. But spurred on by how much we’d enjoyed our button business, we plunged headlong into a sideline T-shirt business under the banner of 272 Productions, a blend of Amy’s childhood phone number and an homage to July 2 (7/2), the night of our first date.
For the most part, Amy was our one-woman creative department, while I was in charge of marketing, operations, and legal. Some of the designs were originals. We licensed others from artists and writers. We worked hard at it, and we loved it. There were the “Tee for Two” T-shirts, sold as a pair, each bearing half of the yin/yang symbol. There were such favorites as “Does ‘anal retentive’ have a hyphen?”; “I’d love to have a nervous breakdown but I can’t seem to find the time”; “procrastinate later”; and “Just because I have a short attention span doesn’t mean I.”
When the Chicago Bulls won their first three championships, we came up with the design of three images of Peter Brady from The Brady Bunch and the caption “3 Pete,” a wordplay on the popular term three-peat, for when a team wins three championships in a row. Brilliant, right? Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the requisite licensing, so those T-shirts are still sitting in mothballs.
We had such a great time, and overall sales were going so well that more than once I was tempted to give up my day job, but I never quite managed to pull the trigger.
And then there was “Never stop learning! Take classes, read, cook, and travel.” Oh, yes. We lived by this big-time.
Amy’s art director at the ad agency became a close friend. The two women worked long, intense days together, even longer and more intense than my days as a young lawyer. It grew into a tradition for us to meet after work at the art director’s house, around nine p.m., for copious amounts of French red wine and a spectacular meal prepared by her husband, Tom, who happened to be a gourmet chef.
For my twenty-fifth birthday, Amy gave me a brilliant gift she knew she’d end up enjoying as much as I would—a series of cooking lessons from Tom. The routine went like this: I’d head to Tom’s after work. He’d already have a meal designed to teach me. We’d discuss it over a preparatory scotch and then start cooking. By the time our wives got home from work, we’d have a feast waiting for them, along with an appropriately breathed bottle of wine.
Thanks to Tom, and Amy’s flair for creative gift-giving, I learned how to make everything from bechamel sauce to tapenade to fish prepared according to the Canadian cooking method. Perhaps Amy knew, even this early in our relationship, that my creativity was deep-rooted. She was prescient, anticipating that my day job as a lawyer would always be a struggle for me.
And still on the subject of “Never stop learning!,” Amy also encouraged me to follow through on the desire I had always had to paint. I had never studied art. The closest I had ever come was a woodshop class in grade school, in the basement of a Chicago Park District building. (I can still smell the burning wood as I write this.) I learned how to use a table saw and made a shelf my father hung in his groovy apartment in the 1970s. I might have made a lamp as well. But the instructor never implied that I should consider turning pro at woodworking, and it didn’t really satisfy the “artist” part of me that I probably inherited from Dad.
I signed up for classes in the studio of an accomplished professional painter. It was me and three or four other students, depending on the week, all women of retirement age; and it was, in a word, fabulous. I learned the color wheel. I learned to love mixing colors, making beautiful grays from various combinations of blue and orange and differing amounts of white. I learned how to put together an abstract acrylic painting. I learned that I love the hypnotic act of painting, and the solitude and focus of it. I learned that I love to create.
I’ve never been sure if my paintings are any good. All I was sure of, all that mattered, was that Amy was a huge, enthusiastic fan. In fact, a part of her wanted me to paint on a more regular basis, maybe tip the scale more toward my artwork and away from my nine-to-five job as a lawyer. Again, I never could bring myself to pull that trigger; but just knowing she believed in me that much has kept me painting to this very day.
We also became regular practitioners of ashtanga yoga, a very intense form of practice. For a while we had an instructor, Lisa, come to our house to help me get familiar with the intricacies of the practice. Even after more than a decade, I never gained much flexibility in my stiff hips, while Amy was Gumby-like from the very beginning. I did have the distinction, though, of being Lisa’s only student who practiced to the music of Nine Inch Nails. Yoga grew to be a huge part of our lives, and when time and life allowed, we traveled the world together, seeking out yoga destinations. (Subgoal no. 4 of Never stop learning!: travel.)
Many years later we started frequenting a historic place called the Green Mill on Broadway in uptown Chicago. It’s the oldest jazz club in the United States, and apparently it was a favorite haunt of Al Capone’s. Of infinitely more interest to us was the fact that Thursday nights at the Green Mill showcased the most exquisite professional and amateur dancers of all ages. There they’d be, effortless and intoxicating, swing dancing on a tiny dance floor in front of a big band, surrounded by tables of patrons sipping martinis.
It didn’t take long for us to decide that as much fun as it was to watch, it would probably be even more fun to do. We managed to track down a teacher who’d taught many of those Green Mill dancers and hired her to give us private swing/big band dance lessons. We were so excited.
Unfortunately, as life would have it, we had to quit after just one class.
But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
Looking back on that list, so many of the things on it would later define our marriage. Even something as simple as my skills in the kitchen. The seeds of the strength of our marriage were in that list. So much of what we were and what we became was possible because of that list.