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We Make a Magical World for Two
San Francisco! The magic of being newlyweds and a formal, legal “couple” slid without effort into the exhilaration of planning a really big trip to that city by the bay: City Lights Bookstore, where we might cross paths with the great poet of revolution, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Green Apple Books, where used books in the upstairs room might have once been held by, say, Diane Wakowski. Or Adrienne Rich. A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, where just the poetic name of the shop gave me shivers.
Our “families of origin” didn’t grasp how excited we were (books? you want a honeymoon with books??), but it didn’t matter to us. We loved our families, of course; they were our past, and likely to always stay the way they were. Our future shivered in first-edition books we hadn’t yet caressed, in stories of writing great literature gathered “from the author’s mouth,” in embracing the seething fertile chaos of new poems and stories and mysteries. Together!
For all the ways in which we fit each other so perfectly — our eagerness, our desire to learn more, to build from what we brought, to discover, to open more insights into the creative world, even the comfort of our midlife bodies sharing the bed (which Dave almost immediately traded up in size, from a queen to a king size — “too big now,” I said, scrambling across to curl around him) — of course there were other pieces of…
