I already felt as if I’d found nirvana when I met Amy. The addition of the Krouse family was a bonus beyond my wildest imagination. Holy cow, what fantastic people. Her parents, Ann and Paul, were clearly a connected, loving couple, kind, devoted to their children, and immediately welcoming to me. Ann still enjoys telling the story of how she and Amy were taking a walk after Amy and I met, and Amy was so enthusiastic—okay, effusive—about meeting me that it made her folks more accepting of me. Amy’s siblings, Beth, Katie, and Joe, are amazing and loving, to one another and to me. They would all agree that Amy, as the eldest child, set the tone and paved the way for their incredible childhoods and family life.
Ann and Paul were successful, self-made people who’d started their own business and worked together every day of their lives for decades, so I guess it was kind of a natural evolution that as we began to spend more and more time together, Amy and I entered into the first of our two start-ups. Ready? A button business.
We scoured flea markets everywhere we went and snatched up any and all buttons that caught our eyes. Then, once we’d amassed a huge stash of an unbelievable variety of buttons, we began turning them into jewelry, mostly bracelets and brooches. I’d never really pictured myself designing bracelets and brooches, but I have to say, there was something hypnotically mindful about the act of sewing buttons onto material. I even learned what “fray check” is (a liquid-plastic solution that stays invisible to give garments clean, perfect edges). The term fray check outlasted our button business—for years to come, one or the other of us would slip it into a conversation out of nowhere, and it made us laugh every single time.
Laughing together. Working together. Just being together. We had so much fun making, marketing, and selling our art. Somehow, without trying, this diminutive woman had filled me up with something I did not know I wanted or needed. I had not had it on my radar to commit to someone for the rest of my life at such a young age, but the natural way this relationship was developing felt just right.
Then again, we began to enjoy our union no matter what we were doing together.
2
No Longer Just One
I truly believe Jason loves you for exactly who you are, and that is what I prayed for you—for you to have someone who could appreciate and treasure all the wonderful facets of Amy.
—Ann Wolk Krouse to her daughter Amy
Amy and I met in July 1989, and by November 1990 we were engaged. Of course, Amy would pick up on the acrostic nature of that coincidence: July, August, September, October, and November = JASON. Throughout that period, our feelings for each other grew in what felt to me to be a natural progression of a healthy relationship. I suppose I always knew I wanted to get married and have a family, but that was a concept I figured would come much later, or at least sometime after I turned thirty. With Amy, that simply was not meant to be. Our love grew as we spent more and more time together.
Consistent with what I imagined a quality young man was “supposed” to do, I asked Amy’s folks for her hand in marriage. I went the traditional route—I bought a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a nice bottle of scotch before making the twenty-six-mile drive down the Edens Expressway to the Krouse house. Ann and Paul greeted me with their typical enthusiasm, and I nonchalantly strolled through their front door as if my arms weren’t full of anything at all, let alone flowers and a fine scotch. They played along and didn’t mention them either.
We took the long walk down to the family sunroom. I sat on the couch facing them, comfortable as always, and for about forty-five minutes, we just talked. Finally I presented the gifts, broached the subject at hand (pun intended), and told them why I was there. I promised them I’d love and respect Amy for the rest of my life. They didn’t doubt it for a second, and gave me their delighted consent.
Around this time, my dad still owned his commercial film studio. I had my own set of keys, because I’d worked there. Having access to the studio allowed me to have epic high school parties there. (Sorry we never talked about that, Dad.) With some creative adjustments, it seemed like a perfect space for a marriage proposal.
Amy and I both had connections to Paris, France. My grandma Sara was born and raised there until she was thirteen years old. Amy was a French major and spent her junior year of college studying there. So I transformed the film stage into a replica of Paris and added a table with a red gingham tablecloth, complete with a bottle of wine, a candle, photos of the City of Romance, and a bread basket with the engagement ring hidden inside.
French music was playing in the background when I proposed.
She said yes.
Of course, there were no cell phones, so I borrowed a studio Polaroid camera, and am in possession of one photo memorializing the occasion.
We made it clear that we wanted a small wedding. Amy’s folks were a little disappointed—they’d been looking forward to celebrating the marriage of their eldest child with their vast group of friends.
We met in July 1989. By November 1990, we were engaged.
(July, August, September, October, November.)
We compromised and agreed to throw a big engagement party . . . our way. We rented a nice, spacious loft so there would be plenty of room for our guests. The loft happened to be in Chicago’s South Loop, which in 1990 was an “emerging neighborhood,” a polite way of saying it was in the early stages of gentrification but still kind of rough around the edges. The Krouses still chuckle to this day, looking back on the sight of 120 people in formal wear, many of whom were fresh from the safe, cozy suburbs, emerging from their cars and gaping around at a strange part of town for which they were decidedly overdressed.
Our wedding was as intimate and magical as we’d hoped. We held it at Amy’s parents’ home, which by definition guaranteed perfection, thanks to Ann’s gifted attention to detail and planning. The gathering of Krouses and Rosenthals permeated the house with an almost palpable aura of love and family. My best friend Dave was my best man. He and I shared a scotch, in one of the Krouse kids’ bedrooms that hadn’t been redecorated since high school, while we got dressed for the evening’s main event.
The ceremony went along beautifully and predictably until it was my turn to say my vows. No one was more surprised than I was when I suddenly burst into tears and began to weep like a baby. I’m still not sure exactly why.
Maybe I got hit by the colossal size of the commitment I was making at the ripe old age of twenty-six.
Maybe my tendency to bottle up my emotions and very rarely cry finally caught up with me.
Or, likeliest of all, maybe, standing there looking into my bride’s eyes, it hit me to my core that I was experiencing the most complete, most genuinely happy moment of my life.
Our honeymoon was perfect. We split the time between California and Colorado. In California we drove down Highway 1 along the Pacific coastline. We spent beautiful evenings at Ventana in Big Sur, a luxury hotel “where the sky, sea, mountains and redwoods all converge” (as they describe it on their website), and more beautiful evenings at the San Ysidro Ranch in the Santa Barbara foothills, overlooking the ocean. Colorado was a skiing excursion, during which I managed to dislocate my shoulder—again—but that did not alter my pure elation at the occasion or let it stop me, or us, for a second.
We were young, “deeply in love” is an understatement, and we were ecstatically excited about the infinite possibilities of the life we were starting together.
I got my first glimpse into living with a writer; when our conversation turned to thoughts about our future, we literally wrote out a list of our mutual marital commitments and gave it a title: “Amy and Jason Rosenthal’s Marriage Goals and Ideas.”
They were lofty intentions, but we lived by them—for the most part. We didn’t do too well on the “lunch together once a week” thing, for example, because, well, life. In general, though, that simple list became the model we followed in our marriage. It established the foundation for how we wanted to be as people and as a c
ouple as we began to start a family.
It made sense that it was formalized into a written list, too. For one thing, Amy was the queen of list-making, which she elevated into an art form. The idea of lists in general became ingrained in our family life. Yes, Amy was a list maker in all facets of her life, but the skill drifted in to all of our lives as well. There were lists for the babysitter, lists for how to spend the afternoon, lists analyzing a decision (pros and cons), and lists for me when Amy went out of town on a business trip.
* * *
Amy and Jason Rosenthal’s Marriage Goals and Ideas
Have lunch together at least once a week.
Keep sex fun.
Reading>TV.
Dinner time = time2B2gether. Music in the background is fine, TV is not.
Never stop learning! Take classes, read, cook and travel.
Get dressed up and go on dates.
Whenever we sign something “Amy & Jason,” we both sign our name.
Annual portraits—“unadorned face” Start July, 1991, 25 years later (July, 2016) publish book! Entitled “Metamorphosis.”
Record our kids’ voices every year.
To, at some point (hopefully soon), work together, have our own business. Life is too short and we love being together too much to spend 9–5 apart every day.
Keep our cupboards & fridge continually stocked with good, healthy food.
* * *
For another thing, I’m not a neuropsychologist, but it’s common sense to me that writing something down makes it more likely that you’ll get it done, and that’s what happened with this list. That list of marriage goals wasn’t affixed to our nightstand or taped to the mirror in our bathroom—in fact I hadn’t seen it for years until I came across it after Amy’s death. But the muscle memory behind the emotions of the list had been powerful. We’d made it twenty-six years earlier, yet when I visited it again after so much time had passed, it felt so familiar. The specifics of this list we wrote on our honeymoon were recognizable for the way it guided our lives without staring us in the face. Without our realizing it, year after year it really did set the tone for addressing issues that came up during the course of our marriage. It set out our shared values when we were so young, and then those values manifested themselves without our trying to model them intentionally.
This thinking proved crucial early on in our marriage when we came to a crossroads, the biggest test we’d faced in our young lives together.
Amy was an established rock star in the advertising business by then. She was a copywriter, and she loved it. She’d come home with stories of what she and her colleagues did that day at work, and it sounded more like play to me. I’d never heard of a job like it. (My dad and stepdad were both in advertising but they never described their careers in this way!) She was a witty, smart, masterfully creative woman who thrived in the company of other witty, smart, masterfully creative people. She had a great reputation in the business, so it made perfect sense when one of the most sought-after firms in the country reached out to her with a job offer.
It was an incredible, well-deserved compliment, and an amazing opportunity. Amy was as giddy as a little girl, and I couldn’t have been happier for her. There was just one downside: The job would require us to move to Portland, Oregon. Two thousand miles from home. We had no family in Portland, and maybe one friend.
I was just beginning to establish myself as a Chicago lawyer. Though I was working at a small firm, I had dreamed of opening my own practice as a solo practitioner instead of joining a firm. The dream to hang out my own shingle came from my life as an entrepreneur. From an early age I’d held a job. This process began when I was eight years old and had my own paper route. From there, I worked steadily all through law school in different fields. Also, my role modeling for a career path up to this point came from my parents, who were both self-employed their entire adult lives. And all of my contacts were in my hometown. If I was going to build a business, the odds were in favor of my building it there.
At the same time, though, I was excited for Amy’s opportunity to soar in a career in which she was already a heavyweight and work on some of the most creative campaigns in the country.
So we took a trip to Portland. Amy interviewed with the ad agency, while I had a few informal chats with a couple of law firms and the legal department at the Nike campus. Nice people. Nice city. Great potential. No red flags.
Next we sat down with Ann and Paul, Amy’s parents, whose advice we’d always respected. We met them for lunch, and Amy launched into a detailed description of this incredible job offer from this prestigious company. Okay, Portland, but she was so excited as she told them about it that she could barely contain herself.
Their response was immediate and definitive—incredulous, they threw down the gauntlet. How could Amy be so selfish? What about me and my fledgling career? What about the fact that saying yes to this job offer would mean a two-thousand-mile separation between us and our families, all of whom lived right here in the area? Yes, it was a prestigious offer, but that only made it even more likely that she could find something equally prestigious in Chicago, or at least a whole lot closer to home.
I’d never seen Amy cry so hard in our newly formed bond. She was so emotionally fraught, wanting so badly to fulfill this dream but knowing that the practicality of her parents’ advice was spot-on. Our final decision was arrived at through many tears and conversations; we practiced our list-making prowess, wrote out the pros and cons on paper, and took a deep dive into what the consequences of staying home meant for both of our careers.
In the end, we chose Chicago. We chose home. We chose family.
And we grew, individually and as a couple, from the whole experience.
We never looked back, and one by one we checked off marriage goals and ideas to help keep us moving forward.
Keep sex fun. No problem there. End of discussion.
Reading>TV. We deliberately never, ever had a TV in our bedroom. Amy’s nightstand was always stacked with the books she devoured. I read every night too; but unlike Amy, I was always out cold after a couple of paragraphs. I’d invariably wake up sometime during the night with the book perched on my chest, still held in my hands. Years later, when my insomnia kicked in, I developed the habit of waking up, climbing out of bed with my book, and settling in to read in the barber chair I kept in the corner of our bedroom until fatigue finally kicked in.
Whenever we sign something “Amy & Jason,” we both sign our name. Absolutely. Literally every single time.
To, at some point (hopefully soon), work together, have our own business. Life is too short and we love being together too much to spend 9–5 apart every day. The nine-to-five thing wasn’t very realistic, it turned out, with both of us hard at work on our full-time careers. But spurred on by how much we’d enjoyed our button business, we plunged headlong into a sideline T-shirt business under the banner of 272 Productions, a blend of Amy’s childhood phone number and an homage to July 2 (7/2), the night of our first date.
For the most part, Amy was our one-woman creative department, while I was in charge of marketing, operations, and legal. Some of the designs were originals. We licensed others from artists and writers. We worked hard at it, and we loved it. There were the “Tee for Two” T-shirts, sold as a pair, each bearing half of the yin/yang symbol. There were such favorites as “Does ‘anal retentive’ have a hyphen?”; “I’d love to have a nervous breakdown but I can’t seem to find the time”; “procrastinate later”; and “Just because I have a short attention span doesn’t mean I.”
When the Chicago Bulls won their first three championships, we came up with the design of three images of Peter Brady from The Brady Bunch and the caption “3 Pete,” a wordplay on the popular term three-peat, for when a team wins three championships in a row. Brilliant, right? Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the requisite licensing, so those T-shirts are still sitting in mothballs.
We had such a great time, and overall sa
les were going so well that more than once I was tempted to give up my day job, but I never quite managed to pull the trigger.
And then there was “Never stop learning! Take classes, read, cook, and travel.” Oh, yes. We lived by this big-time.
Amy’s art director at the ad agency became a close friend. The two women worked long, intense days together, even longer and more intense than my days as a young lawyer. It grew into a tradition for us to meet after work at the art director’s house, around nine p.m., for copious amounts of French red wine and a spectacular meal prepared by her husband, Tom, who happened to be a gourmet chef.
For my twenty-fifth birthday, Amy gave me a brilliant gift she knew she’d end up enjoying as much as I would—a series of cooking lessons from Tom. The routine went like this: I’d head to Tom’s after work. He’d already have a meal designed to teach me. We’d discuss it over a preparatory scotch and then start cooking. By the time our wives got home from work, we’d have a feast waiting for them, along with an appropriately breathed bottle of wine.
Thanks to Tom, and Amy’s flair for creative gift-giving, I learned how to make everything from bechamel sauce to tapenade to fish prepared according to the Canadian cooking method. Perhaps Amy knew, even this early in our relationship, that my creativity was deep-rooted. She was prescient, anticipating that my day job as a lawyer would always be a struggle for me.
And still on the subject of “Never stop learning!,” Amy also encouraged me to follow through on the desire I had always had to paint. I had never studied art. The closest I had ever come was a woodshop class in grade school, in the basement of a Chicago Park District building. (I can still smell the burning wood as I write this.) I learned how to use a table saw and made a shelf my father hung in his groovy apartment in the 1970s. I might have made a lamp as well. But the instructor never implied that I should consider turning pro at woodworking, and it didn’t really satisfy the “artist” part of me that I probably inherited from Dad.
My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me Page 2
