The Way You Look Tonight
On Chicken Dances, NBA Finals, missed trick-or-treats and 28 years together.
Today is our 28th anniversary. That doesn’t seem possible since there’s a part of me that refuses to believe I’m older than 28, but the calendar keeps insisting. Also, the kids refuse to stop aging and are now out of the house. Also, we are in Raleigh to celebrate the occasion, at least in part because the Raleigh Pen Show is going on here.
When your beloved is perfectly happy to go to a city to celebrate because they have a fountain pen show going on, you are on at least your 28th wedding anniversary.
The only thing that I’ve really learned about getting older is that the years that seem so recent keep growing more distant in the rearview mirror. I do not really believe that 1998 was 28 years ago. And then I remember that we spent a good portion of our honeymoon watching the NBA Finals between the Bulls and Jazz. That was Michael Jordan’s last Finals.
Jordan to Wembenyama.
That’s our married life. Jordan to Wembenyama.
Margo and I met on a basketball court. These were the days when we both worked for the Kansas City Star, and there were enough people in the sports department to play a weekly basketball game. Margo was assigned to cover me. I’ll keep my feelings about that to myself. In our very first conversation, Margo told me that she grew up in a tiny Kansas town called Cuba, where her high school was so small they played eight-man football. She said that her high school graduating class was 12.
There seemed to be only one question worth asking when I heard that.
“Were you valedictorian?” I asked.
She was. That was a relief. The salutatorian in her class didn’t finish in the top 5%.
We were married on a Friday evening at a historic Kansas City house. The fantastic brass band we hired for the ceremony played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” because they just felt the moment, and the fantastic jazz band we hired for the dinner refused to play the Chicken Dance. That was one of our first fights. Margo wanted the Chicken Dance at our wedding. I did not. She thought it would be fun. I did not. I went to the bandleader just before the wedding began and said, “Listen, people will request the Chicken Dance tonight. It’s even possible the bride will request the Chicken Dance. I want to be very clear: I do not want the Chicken Dance to be played at my wedding.”
The bandleader was more than happy not to play the Chicken Dance.
They did play “The Way You Look Tonight.” That was our first dance.
Twenty-eight years. Almost half a life ago. We had no idea what was coming. No one ever does, right? I would end up traveling the world because I just so happened to be among the last generation of newspaper and magazine writers who did such things. In the early days, Margo would often come along. Australia. London. New York. River Falls, Wisconsin. No, the trips were not always glamorous, no. Our older daughter, Elizabeth, took her first step in a Best Western in Hutchinson, Kansas. Our younger daughter, Katie, spent so much of her childhood high-fiving Big 12 mascots.
When the girls got older, we found ourselves apart a lot, especially on weekends, and especially on holidays. That’s the thing about being a sportswriter; it’s all weekends and holidays. New Year’s, I was at bowl games. Christmas, I was at holiday tournaments. The hardest was Halloween; I would be at the World Series. I missed trick-or-treating once, when the girls were little — just so I could watch the Yankees beat the Phillies 8-5 in a dreary three-and-a-half hour slugfest.
“It’s OK,” Margo assured me because she heard the despair in my voice that night. “We took lots of pictures.”
I called my editor the next day and said that, no matter what happened, I would never miss trick-or-treating again. And I never did. I would leave the World Series, come home, take the girls out, then return to the World Series the next day.
But we couldn’t do that for everything, and so I would be gone for weekends in Denver, or Green Bay, or Buffalo or Stillwater. I would be gone for a month in Beijing or Torino or South Africa. I would be gone for the Stanley Cup Finals (happening right here in Raleigh now — what a game last night!), or the Masters, or U.S. Open tennis. I was gone. We would talk on the phone every day.
Sometimes that was enough. Once, a day or two after Elizabeth had her tonsils out, she had a rough night, and I was somewhere or other, and Margo called, and together over the phone we calmed her down by reciting each of Barbie’s 12 Dancing Princesses again and again:
Ashlyn. Blair. Courtney. Delia. Edeline. Fallon. Genevieve. Hadley. Isla. Janessa. Kathleen. Lacey.
More often than not, though, the phone couldn’t bridge the distance.
And we did the best we could.
The world changed on us because that’s what the world insists on doing. Newspapers faded. Magazines faded. Technology shifted. The girls grew older. It’s different. But not all different. Sometimes 1998 feels like forever ago. Sometimes it feels like yesterday.
But here we are, still in love, still best friends, still getting ready to watch the NBA Finals together. Jordan to Wembenyama. And when someone asks the secret, I tell them it comes down to two things: One, you need to be lucky enough to find someone with a good heart who cares about you as much as you care about them. That’s how you get through the hard times. And that’s how you enjoy the good times.
And two: Don’t play the Chicken Dance at your wedding.
Unless you both want it.