Still

Last night we had dinner with the younger sister of a friend of mine from Yale. In the forty years since we met Susie, right after we were married and she was a teenager, we'd seen her on only two other occasions—her brother's wedding and his fiftieth birthday party. So last night presented a rare opportunity to spend some time together.

During dinner, at a fine old Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica, California, Susie spoke of the impression we'd made on her the first time we met. "The way you looked at each other," Susie said. "It was powerful." My wife was looking down so I wasn't sure she'd heard this. Yes, she said, she'd heard. If she was looking down, it was because she was blushing.

I think I was blushing too. It hadn't occurred to me that during the summer following our wedding, my wife and I might have looked at one other in a "powerful" way, but it was sweet, forty years later, to think that maybe we did. Or at least that it looked that way to a teenage girl who, forty years later, still remembered the impression we'd made on her and seemed to be reminded of it last night...by something, perhaps, in the way my wife and I looked at one another still?