March 30, 2010- I’ve made a lot of announcements on this blog in the four years it’s been up and running, but none have been more important to me, or made me happier to write than this one.

Maria and I are getting married. We have decided on a Quaker wedding in a Friend’s Meeting House.

There, we will exchange our vows in the company of friends and family. It’s difficult to write about my feelings for Maria, most of which can and should remain private. Sometimes it felt as if we were two shipwrecked people afloat in a big and stormy sea. In a way, we have grown up together and learned the meaning of pain, trust and love.

I love her, of course, and am grateful to her. She opened my heart and soul and suffused my life with love and goodness. She changed, in some ways, saved my life. She is supportive and encouraging. She is dear and creative.

As a story-teller,  I am abashed to be somewhat at a loss to describe the soul connection we have, except I thought of it clearly the other night when we drove around on a beautiful, windy, sunny afternoon, and she sketched while I crawled around stone walls. I worried that she would grow impatient, but she was as happy and content as I was.

She was my closest friend for some years, and now my lover and partner, and I never in all of my life imagined the joy and connection that we experience together every day.

The blog is important to me. It has become more than a blog – the record of a life, and its struggles and failures, and joys and triumphs. This is a joy and triumph. So it must be recorded her. Maria didn’t want me to mention this here until she had told her friends and family. I was impatient, of course,  to put it up.

I can hardly believe Maria would want to marry me, but I am resolved that this marriage will be loving, gentle and affirming to the end of my days. Good relationships, like anything else, take work, and I am determined to work hard in this marriage.

And so, later in life, my soul has opened itself up, to remind me that our days are short and must be lived well, and that our stories are important. Maria and I are now one of the most glorious and important stories in my life. I believe in marriage, and I wish to do it properly. My daughter Emma Span, has agreed to be my Best Man. Lenore will be the flower girl. Izzy will do the greeting.

My favorite writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote that there is no greater glory than to die for love.

Or to live for it, I would add.