David and I met in the fall of 1978 at a hardware store in Akron, Ohio.
This is not a romantic setting for a love story, and I have always found something honest about that. We were not at a party or a dance or any of the places that stories prefer. I was twenty-three, buying weatherstripping for the drafty apartment door I had been meaning to fix for two months, and I did not know how to select the right kind for the frame I was working with. The man at the next aisle over noticed me standing in front of the display looking at the options with what must have been obvious uncertainty, and he said, without being asked, that the foam tape generally worked better than the felt for exterior doors in Ohio winters.
I told him I was not sure it was an exterior door, technically, since it opened onto a shared hallway.
He thought about this for a moment with the seriousness of someone for whom the distinction was genuinely important.
“Probably split the difference,” he said. “Get the medium density.”
Then he went back to whatever he was looking for.
I found the medium density weatherstripping. I also stood in the aisle for another three minutes in case he came back. He did not come back that day. But I saw him the following week at the checkout counter of the same store, and this time he recognized me and asked if the weatherstripping had worked.
I told him I had not yet installed it.
He offered to help.
His name was David Mercer and he was twenty-six and he worked as an electrician and he fixed my apartment door that evening with the focused competence of someone who finds solving small problems genuinely satisfying rather than merely obligatory. He stayed for dinner, which I made from what I had in the refrigerator, which was not much, and we talked until eleven.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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