They fell in love the first time they met, and with that, something shifted at the table, in the air, in the universe.
He was a national figure in the neurosurgery field and the eccentric member of the intellectual inner circle of a very respectful university in the Washington DC area. She had just arrived on campus as a newly appointed dean of its art school.
She impressed him even more than her beauty when she started to talk.
He was 62 with three young daughters, and she was 50 with a young son. They found out they had a lot of shared interests, including the fact that they both were married to other significant ones.
They waited ten years and then eventually divorced their spouses. And three years later, after their now-adult kids moved out of their houses, he proposed to her on the airplane flying to his favorite city in Italy, which he had visited more than 50 times. A wedding followed with no guests except for a senator who had known the groom for 25 years. The senator officiated the couple.
A live happily ever after love story I read from the New York Times announcement section. There were even two photos of the newlywed and the senator.
I was very taken by this announcement.
It is a great love story, but how about the other six people directly involved and impacted?
The second time I opened this announcement a week later, I was trying to build up the timeline of their failing marriages and the age of their kids. Then I found out that the article was marked as “updated with minor corrections.” The corrections were made just three days after the announcement was first out.
Unlike many other NYT articles with modifications details, this one did not elaborate on what was modified.
But I knew that the sentence “now-adult kids moved out of their houses” was gone, and whether the three daughters and the one son were “young” when they first met or ten years later when they divorced now became deliberately vague in the announcement.
So, was someone so upset that s/he went that far to call up the NYT news agency and pressed to bury the above two details?
Or, was it done upon the newlywed’s second thoughts after the article was published and the vast responses they received?
It is likely the second possibility. But if so, perhaps this new couple should be better off not making such an announcement. They already won a giant lottery in their second lives that was inevitably causing some damage and lifelone scars to their loved ones; they’d better be quiet about it.
But their enduring love story is so extraordinary and unconventional so perhaps some of their close friends insisted on calling up an NYT paid wedding announcement as a wedding gift. (I totally envision myself doing so if I were their close friend.)
It was a fascinating piece of small news that brought us readers so much to indulge and speculate, and last not least, to ridicule when me and my friends sitting in front of a camp fire under the starry night of Eastern Sierra.
