I first met Deborah in 1977, close to her 25th birthday (December 9), at the Crystal City apartment I shared with Jeff Tucker. Jeff was my college roommate freshman and sophomore years; he was Deborah’s high school classmate at Fox Lane in Mt Kisco. (He was trying to play matchmaker, I think.) I can still remember my first glimpse of her, standing in our living room wearing a winter coat. Tall, slim, with long brown wavy hair, she was very attractive. It didn’t take long to find out she was also smart and pleasant to talk to. Jeff asked about a relationship that was in the process of ending. I was smitten.
Deborah was not anxious to jump into another relationship (I told you she was smart), and when I asked her out (after spending some time with her and Jeff occasionally at our place and at hers), she turned me down the first couple times. (Once, I’d bought tickets for the Tubes at the Warner before asking her, and ended up taking Jeff instead. It was a pretty good show, with a cameo featuring Root Boy Slim in their performance of “White Punks on Dope.”) But eventually she got lonely or felt sorry for me, because she called me one day and invited me over to her apartment in Glover Park (shared with a strange woman named Leslie, who was later replaced by an even stranger Carrie, a genuine Powwow Princess) to “grade papers and fool around.” The papers were nothing special (she was a TA in an Anthropology course at GW), but the rest of the evening was magical. We spent more and more time together after that.
But I was not the only man with my eyes on this prize, as it turned out. I had some anxious moments before Deborah decided to stop seeing the geographically challenged Bruce, an assistant prof at Penn State she’d become involved with while on a summer artifact hunt in Mexico. The clincher for me was a conversation we had sitting in the tiny rose garden in front of the Arts and Industries Building (where she worked for the formidable Pam Henson transcribing oral history interviews of significant figures in the history of the Smithsonian). Deborah asked me what my attitude was about exclusivity. I said immediately I was a “one woman man” and that wasn’t going to change. It was evidently what she wanted to hear.
There was a list of prior boyfriends that was impressive for a 25 year old, but heck, I was married (albeit separated) and could hardly object to anyone else’s past history. None of those boyfriends deserved her, as far as I can judge, and at least one of them (the most long-term and serious) had been a total shit. (His perfidy will not be recounted here, but he thoroughly disgraced himself. By chance, we sat behind him at a Bullets game once. I managed not to dump a drink on him.) He was not a tough act to follow.
The final test of our relationship before the decision to live together was a trip out West. Deborah has always liked traveling. I’ve never been interested. Being willing to go was the first test, which I passed. I insisted on paying for everything, which had to be another plus, right? But it was the actual experience of traveling together that was key. You find out a lot about a person when put in awkward and/or surprising situations with them. Can you agree on a hotel on short notice? What happens when you get temporarily lost on the road? Can you share a tent? Who drives, and does the other person refrain from commenting on said driving? We used the time alone with each other to talk about personal stuff and generally become closer. Most importantly, we spent two or three weeks with each other 24/7 and it went really well. I did lose it after getting creamed at gin (I fancied myself a good player) one time too many at our campsite in Big Sur. After several disastrous hands, Deborah picked up her cards, pulled the first one off the top of the deck, said “Gin!” and laid them down. I gathered them up without a word and threw the deck into the campfire. Deborah expostulated, “How can we play cards now?” but I just said, “Who were you going to play cards with?” and she got it.
It was a nice trip and convinced me that traveling wasn’t so terrible after all. I’d never seen real mountains before, and I guess that’s what impressed me most. But we did a lot that was new for both of us: San Francisco (the Hotel Herbert!), King’s Canyon, Arches Natl Park, the Grand Tetons, seeing our first moose (a little too close), and rafting down the Snake River two days with a group (the highlight of the trip), arranged by Deborah’s friend Janet McReynolds, with whom we stayed in Salt Lake City.
Deborah and I got along well with each other’s families, which always helps. Judy took to Deborah immediately. The first time I met Esther, she said that I better take a good look because that’s how Deborah was going to look in 25 years. I said that if that’s the case I wasn’t ever going to let go of Deborah. I can be charming when the stakes are high enough.
After we returned from our trip out West, we decided to move in together. I still wasn’t divorced from Joey, so that was a little awkward, but I got that done fairly soon, there being no objection from Joey. Our first place was a one bedroom apartment in a high rise a half mile West of Rosslyn, on the second floor above the dumpster; it was on Adams St. I believe the first day of our lease was November 1, 1978, less than a year after we met. Deborah was very patient with me while I worked out some youthful idiocies, which I hope I was properly grateful for. We combined our finances from the start. I didn’t see why we shouldn’t. We both handle money well and are completely honest with each other, and discussed any major purchases reasonably. We were (and still are) compatible in other important ways, too: neither of us is at all religious, we’re both liberal Democrats, and neither of us considers the other prejudiced against any group of people. We don’t like to fight; one of us has raised his/her voice to the other maybe a half dozen times in our marriage, and neither of us has said anything we needed to apologize for. Of course we both got annoyed with the other on numerous occasions, but we managed to keep things civil and any disagreements were quickly forgotten.
Our commute was simple: we walked down the railroad right of way (the ties were still there) that later became the roadbed for westbound Lee Highway to Rosslyn. It was almost bucolic. The President’s Day weekend blizzard of ‘79 was pretty amazing; I’m not sure we saw that much snow again. The Govt shut down for a day, then charged us all leave the next couple days because the Metro wasn’t running and there was no other way to get downtown.
We took another trip out West in the summer of ‘79, this time to Seattle, Vancouver I, Vancouver, and a marvelous backpacking trip into Black Tusk park in BC.
Tired of apartment life, we decided to rent a house next. 3501 17th St was a long walk from the Virginia Square Metro stop, in a sort of nice neighborhood, except for the actual neighbors. The Sherwood brothers had houses on either side of our back yard. They had at least one bottle rocket war using our air space. (Bill Sherwood was still living in the same house in 2016, I found when I was out bike riding. Our old house had been demolished years earlier.) There was a mean German Shepherd (Wolf) who bit Deborah’s ankle rather badly when she was unwise enough to try to befriend it. Our back yard was actually very nice. We put up a hammock (there were no Asian Tiger mosquitoes in those days) and could have had a decent vegetable garden. The house itself was nothing much: one bathroom and two small bedrooms upstairs, a living room and dining room downstairs with the kitchen in a converted porch, which meant it froze in the winter. We had to leave the faucet dripping so the pipes wouldn’t burst. The pipes to the bathroom did burst one very cold night. The rent was ridiculously low; maybe $350/month. The landlord was named Biro and had an Elmer Fudd speech impediment, so we had a lot of fun wondering if “Mr. Biwo would wewease us fwom the wease.” We did a lot of painting ourselves, and some plumbing and carpentry too.
It was while we were renting this house that we got married. The wedding was in New York, in the Rockefeller U library, and Esther did a great job arranging things. We got our license in NY City Hall and were married by Esther’s minister of the moment, name of Hughart, a Lutheran I think. The honeymoon was just a week on Cape Hatteras, during which Deborah unfortunately discovered a severe allergy to PABA sunscreen.
Our commitment to each other may seem hasty by today’s standards. But it felt right. I did resist marriage for a while, but it was primarily for tax reasons (the “marriage penalty”) and not because I had any doubts about us. Both of us had experience loving people who had commitment issues, either because they wouldn’t do it in the first place (Deborah’s ex) or because they changed their minds after the wedding (Joey). We talked about everything, and knew our minds and each other’s on this. Deborah wanted children and wouldn’t stay with me if I wouldn’t have any. Although ambivalent, I committed to this too. For my part, I have been in love with Deborah nonstop from 1978 on, and am reasonably certain she feels the same way. Why not plunge into life together? Aside from physical attraction (yes, that is important), we have a deep respect for each other’s intelligence and character, and total trust in each other. Respect and trust are requirements, I think, in any good relationship. If you don’t have those, you are in trouble.
Deborah was working full time for the Anthropology processing lab in the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. Her coworkers were very nice, but that place was poorly managed. I used to say it combined the worst features of academia and government. But what the hell--how many Anthro majors actually get to work in that field after graduation? It seemed a very cool job to me, coding away at the IRS.
The next step was buying a house, according to the instruction booklet that came with us boomers. We chose a rather poor time to do this, after the runup in prices and interest rates that occurred in the Carter administration. We tried to find a house in Maryland, mainly because it would slightly shorten our too-frequent trips to visit our parents, but after several fruitless weeks we started looking in Virginia, and were charmed by our current house on 4th St. We paid $106,000, assuming a $60k VA mortgage at 8½% and taking out a $30k second mortgage at 16½% (!). The latter we paid off in three years. We moved in in July 1981, after 20 months on 17th St.
We enjoyed owning a house without getting carried away about it. Deborah kept improving the decor in ways that were economical and made practical sense. We didn’t get “house proud” as some do; it’s a place to live, not a museum or status symbol.
The commute added a short car trip to street parking near the Clarendon stop; we commuted together until Julia was born, since our workplaces were so close--both near Federal Triangle. After we decided we were ready to have kids, we planned our first trip out of the country together. I’d never left the US; Deborah had been to Mexico a few times to plunder tombs with her fellow hard-drinking archaeologists. Neither of us had been to Europe. Deborah cleverly allowed me to pick our destination and rough itinerary so I bought into the travel thing. We went to Greece in the Fall of 1983. (I could follow the Orioles’ last World Series victory only via the International Herald Tribune in those pre-internet days.) Deborah did all the real work in planning the trip, as she has always done. It was great: lots of history, of course, which is something we both like; magnificent scenery--I’ll never forget Thira (Santorini), for instance; and exposure to another culture. Heck, even the alphabet was different.
I doubt that any man can come close to understanding what it means to a woman to have a child. I have no pretensions to understanding it. As much as Julia’s birth changed me and my life, it can’t be compared to the change it wrought in Deborah. We both had a new focus; the world had a new center. Deborah took nine months off work postpartum, and went back part time. Our friend Kathy Virag (whose son Reuben was six months older) watched Julia when Deborah and I were both working. It went really well. As I expected, Deborah was a great mother. When Julia was 2 ½, we parked her in Clarendon Child Care Center during Deborah’s work days. (I served on the board there for a year, and learned how poorly the caregivers were paid.) It was tough for Deborah to leave her there, but we managed, and Julia didn’t seem to mind. Later she went to Resurrection Child Care (not really a church thing) which was actually better, and our second daughter Audrey followed her there. By then we did it more for the kids’ socialization, because Deborah quit after Audrey’s birth. She did contract work for a while, which was frequently interesting. At the Smithsonian, it was part of her job to handle the artifacts in the collection. So when outsiders like researchers, book publishers, etc. wanted to examine or photograph the objects and the staff did not have the time to deal with them, Deborah could be hired to retrieve the objects and, say, lay them out to be photographed, and then put them back. Her clients included Salamander Books and Kevin Costner’s film company, which did a TV show called “500 Nations” on native Americans. In her best year, I think she grossed about $30k; in her worst, maybe $10k. We both found out the silly stuff localities and other governments do to the self-employed and small business, like tax their business equipment. Eventually, she got a full time (temporary) job in the non-Federal part of the Smithsonian.
We weren’t real disciplinarians, but we did overreact many times to the (typical) dumb stuff our kids got up to. We wish now we hadn’t yelled so much, but the girls don’t seem to bear any emotional scars. Parenting means you get a whole new set of friends and acquaintances: the parents of your kids’ friends, and their teachers/caregivers. Deborah, being pretty much the nicest and most thoughtful person ever, made many friends. (I, being a thoughtless dink, did not.) Julia and Audrey, with Deborah’s example, were relatively socially adept too. Through everything, Deborah was a caring and nurturing mother and treated me better than I deserved.
Family and friends are important to Deborah. She kept up with her college friend Laura Timmerman. She was (and still is) close to Kathy (mentioned above). She and three friends (Anne, Johanna, and Maureen, who called themselves “the coven”) make sure to get together regularly. Ellen and Barb, mothers of Julia’s high school friends, see each other when they can, at happy hours; Barb moved out West but still visits, as we visited her and Mike. Deborah is in a book club. Her mother and siblings call her often (and vice versa). She’s sympathetic and helpful when required, and good company always.
Exercise and recreation were always a part of her routine. (She’s a very good influence on me, inspiring me to join her at the gym for instance, and going on walks and hikes together. She bought me my first decent bicycle (a Windsor 10-speed) and made sure I bought a recumbent after I could no longer ride a bike with a saddle seat (she knew how much I missed biking). She was game for buying kayaks and has gone paddling with me numerous times. The physical activity has helped keep her healthy and slim. It’s helped keep me healthy.
You will never meet a nicer person than Deborah. She has always been empathetic, does not judge others, helps when she can, and listens to people. Everyone likes her and many love her. She’s very smart and has many interests.
As the girls grew, she was always a support to them, whether they appreciated it or not. She did an enormous amount of work to assist Julia with the portfolio she did to apply to architecture programs, for instance. When the girls went away to school, each of them, she missed them like crazy. She had a sixth sense for when they were going through tough times (or maybe she is simply more caring and perceptive than I am) and got very worried when she didn’t have frequent contact with them. Today, both of our daughters know they have a wonderful mother and show it when they’re with her.
