While our daughters were still young and impressionable, my wife Melissa and I made an impulse decision to visit Rome for Thanksgiving. We rented a spectacular three-bedroom apartment near Trevi Fountain. The living room ceiling had a fresco painted centuries ago and an outdoor patio from which we could take in the city while lounging after a long day of sightseeing. On the third day of our trip, we visited the Vatican. We had tickets to see the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museum, and a blessing by Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square. Melissa had researched the day well in advance. She believes in the Catholic rituals more than I do. She carried a map of the Vatican grounds like an assassin in a spy novel nonchalantly studying its contents while concealing her identity as a tourist. We positioned ourselves in a prime location near the center Obelisk, where Pope Francis was known to linger in his Pope Mobile. It was about a two-hour wait for the outdoor blessing and as the time passed the skies darkened.
One of the Swiss guards who was stationed near us all morning approached Melissa. “I’ve just been told that they’re moving the Mass to the Audience Hall,” he said. He pointed to the left of St. Peter’s Basilica. Melissa thanked him, gathered our stuff, grabbed our daughters’ hands, and ducked under the rope.
We then did what we had always done throughout our marriage. Like our lives until that point, we did not weigh the pros and cons for long. We just ran. The four of us sprinted across Saint Peter’s Square, our daughters floating more than walking as Melissa and I clasped their hands in a vice grip as curious onlookers wondered what was happening.
By the time we had crossed the plaza we were well ahead of the crowd, who was just now learning of the location change over the Vatican loudspeaker. We were among the first to enter the Paul VI Audience Hall, a modern structure, which seats over 6,000 people, and quickly positioned ourselves at the railing overlooking the carpeted runway that Pope Francis would walk down.
Melissa and I fended off interlopers and settled in behind our two daughters, whose arms hung over the banister. As we waited for the Pope’s arrival and battled claustrophobia, I fell back on my pre-Mass ritual of meditating and people watching. Those around us seemed they were desperate for a miracle, awaiting Pope Francis’s arrival to perform something extraordinary as Jesus had done in the Gospels so that the course of their lives would be altered for the better. They seemed to be looking for a sacred lottery ticket.
Melissa asked me how I was doing. This was her idea. I hate crowds and while I’m Catholic, I don’t believe in miracles. I said I was OK. And I was, even as our personal space tightened and the crowd started to suffocate me. I looked at Melissa and my daughters, closed my eyes and wondered how I’d arrived at this surreal moment.
*****
Despite being dubious of miracles, it was probably a miracle that I ever fell in love in the first place. I had not planned to do so. I envisioned my life according to a timeline marking where I should be in my career. My dating history lent credence to my unrealistic notion that a perfect companion was out there and until finding that crown jewel it was normal, even expected, to identify the faults in every potential woman I met. Katie is too tall. Erin has no ambition. Bridget is far too ambitious. I questioned, doubted, and spun myself around to pinpoint everything wrong with people far less flawed than me. I viewed each relationship through competing lenses, which sometimes led to the conclusion that I was perfect, and they were not. Other times, I deemed myself not good enough for them. It was a roller coaster of feelings shifting between overconfidence and then descending towards self-doubt. I was looking at the notion of family as something that would add to my life and reinforce who I was, not something that would redefine me. I wasn’t open to being reshaped. I knew where I wanted to go and was searching for someone to take along for the ride.
If it was a miracle that I found myself open to love, that Melissa was even around to court, was the initial celestial act. During the summer after our first year of law school, Melissa was hit by a drunk driver. She was engaged then to a pharmacy student from Omaha. After the driver ran a red light and sped away, Melissa laid in the street unconscious. Onlookers assumed that she was dead. She suffered a broken skull and pelvis. On her death bed, Melissa came closer to God, as well as the realization that her fiancé was not in fact the man of her dreams.
Melissa and I had met at law school orientation. We were friends at first and I was jealous of her boyfriend from Omaha. I kept a respectful distance. I still have a difficult time reading women and was struggling to decipher whether she was flirting or just being nice. At the time, I don’t think she knew either even if she now advocates that it was the latter. We had been dating a few months when I convinced her to drive cross country with me during Winter Break. My brother was moving from Northern California to Dover, Delaware and with time on my hands, I volunteered to drive their Ford Explorer from one end of the country to the other. When my sister-in-law handed me the keys to the truck, I didn’t realize it was symbolic for something greater for she never made it to Delaware. She planned to start a new life back home in Texas, with their two kids and without my brother. As I started the ignition on the 9-hour drive along California’s picturesque Highway 101 to meet Melissa in San Diego, one marriage would be beginning and another ending.
Our relationship survived law school. Melissa and I moved in together for the summer to study for the New York bar exam. We had a regimented schedule, and one morning I started my study routine even though Melissa was late to join me. She was sick for the third day in a row. After about 30 minutes, she exited the bedroom in tears.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“I’m studying. We have Secured Transactions and Contracts today.”
She continued crying. We sat down and I was annoyed that she had interrupted me.
“I haven’t had my period,” she replied.
“What did you eat last night?” I asked.
She cried at the stupidity of the question posed by the potential father of her child. “I think I’m pregnant.”
The dim lights of the 16th Street Mall CVS made me feel like I was in an interrogation room as I searched for pregnancy tests. I first looked in the heartburn aisle and then moved over to the condom aisle, assuming that these might be related products. Here’s how you prevent life and if you fail, take this test. After 10 minutes of aimless searching, I made my way to the feminine section, a place I had never set foot in. There were so many options. The cheaper generic one had a 95% accuracy rate, while the more expensive name brands touted near perfection. It proved accurate and I received the news that I was to be a father not with a confident embrace but terror.
I was plagued by panic attacks over the prospect of parenthood. Would I somehow become the personification of so many things I despised – parents clinging to bottles of wine and game night for survival. My life would change but I wasn’t confident it was for the better. I never envisioned myself as a married man. There were too many things to do and see. Marriage, if at all, was to happen when I was around 35, a good financial nest egg in place and a family that would complement my life, not define it. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to control my destiny. I now questioned the path before me.
It didn’t help that my pangs of self-doubt were enhanced by encounters with kids that signaled I may be in for a long haul. I scarred two small neighbor boys for life after crashing the little red wagon I had taken them for a ride in. In my defense the boys were wimpy, always sporting a permanent coating of sunscreen on their faces, which were hidden under French Foreign Legion sunhats likely purchased on their parents’ “vaca” in Marseille. As much as I hated the boys I panicked when the wagon started fishtailing down a hill I had not foreseen, and the boys were launched one at a time, one to the left and the other to the right, their foreign legion hats popping off their heads like champagne corks on New Year’s. I understand they should’ve been upset but I didn’t expect them to be assholes about it and grow hysterical because their soft white faces now had a little rouge to it.
A few months later, while waiting in line at Einstein Bagels one Saturday morning, I noticed I was being observed by a toddler in front of me who was nestled sweetly in the arms of his father. I ignored him. It was early, and I wasn’t in the mood for games. He kept staring at me while the long line moved ever so slowly. Finally, he blurted out, “That man … with the face!!!” His father swiftly consoled the boy, who seemed on the verge of tears.
“That man …. with the FACE!!!!” the child repeated.
I looked behind me casually so as not to embarrass what I assumed was someone with a severe disfigurement or even worse, a black man wanting a bagel, not to be racially profiled. I figured this innocent child didn’t have any filter for his fear. Or perhaps he was just a racist jerk. I turned my head slowly only to see an older Caucasian man staring at me with the same serious expression as the father. As I turned around, the child could only muster up a simple “That Face!!!” By now, everybody, including the curious Einstein’s staff, had directed their ire at me while harboring the same thought: “Just who does this guy think he is, bothering that small child on a Saturday morning? What a prick!! He’ll suck as a father.”
*****
I never got down on one knee to propose. Over the course of the next few weeks, as things started to settle down and the importance of the bar exam heightened, I returned to the practical. How do we make things work? What’s the new game plan now? Melissa and I went out to dinner. We decided on the practical. We will move to Connecticut, where I had a job, and we will forge ahead like good troopers. We exchanged wedding bands but never an engagement ring. We did away with the formalities. I never asked her father for permission. That seemed a little late.
It wasn’t that I questioned my love for Melissa. That wasn’t the case. During our trip cross country just a year before, we made stops in San Diego, San Antonio, New Orleans, and Atlanta, Georgia. We slow danced at a piano bar at the Hotel Del Coronado with couples three times our age. One man smiled at me and gave me a wink. We laughed as I kept leading Melissa precariously close to other couples. We stayed at a bed and breakfast in San Antonio. We had breakfast with the owner, who told us stories and gave us tidbits about the area. And it was there, later in the day, that Melissa told me she hated bed and breakfasts. She preferred her rooms sprayed with Lysol rather than filled with old unwashed quilts, even if the inn had Yahtzee and Jenga at your disposal. I liked her honesty, and I assured her that except for the one we were going to stay in New Orleans the next day, we would never have to stay in one again. In Atlanta, we dined on hot dogs at the Varsity, visited my old elementary school, and drove by my family’s old house in the section of Vinings. In leather chairs at a lounge in Buckhead, over glasses of bourbon, I told a story of a birthday party I had attended when I was seven, and how you never know how innocuous events can impact your outlook on life. I had never been so at ease with a woman before. It felt natural. The feelings of insecurity and doubt weren’t present. She was my friend. We ate at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans and over gumbo, she declared my love for her. And I for her.
Our wedding ceremony was small and took place on a picturesque New England fall day, shortly after Melissa and I learned we had passed the New York bar exam, she with a better score than me. Melissa wanted a full mass church service and so we chose the parish I attended as a child in Connecticut. My brother and Melissa’s sister served as best man and bridesmaid. They were both going through a divorce. As we departed for our one-day honeymoon in New York City, each hugged us as if they were passing a baton in a relay race, just hoping we would finish.
Behind our back I knew people doubted our future. I was a planner. That was in my DNA. Melissa was too good for me. I was too good for Melissa. I was a neat freak. Melissa was not. Melissa was on Law Review. I was not. Colorado v. Connecticut. Many of our respective families and friends felt like Melissa and I were each giving up something. That we’d always have our separate regrets and that marriage, which came with a child, was something we didn’t want. Maybe down the road but definitely not now. Nobody vocalized the question of abortion, but I knew there were behind-the-scenes conversations and whispers. “There is a way,” some thought, “to make this go away.”
No one asked us what we wanted. Maybe they didn’t because the answer was that I wasn’t sure yet. I didn’t know what the future held. It was a mystery, but for the first time in my life the lack of a plan was something I embraced despite the overwhelming discomfort it caused. And maybe that in and of itself was another miracle.
*****
Our daughter, Madeline, was born in February of 2001, a life born out of love by parents bearing uncertainty. I had never held anything so precious and vulnerable yet so heavy, the weight of responsibility from an insurmountable fear. I had a growing family and the stark realization that I needed to provide for three people rather than one fermented an anxiety so intense it made me ill at times. Melissa had decided to delay her career. Law, she predicted, would still be there after spending the formative years with our child. We never talked much about this decision. This is what she seemed to want, and I agreed. Moreover, who was I to get in the way? I believed that my New York law firm salary was enough to delay Melissa’s entry into the work force while she took care of something more important.
A year after I had started my job, on a crisp Fall Day, similar to the one when I had gotten married, I was asked to go to a conference room to meet with two partners. They didn’t mince words. They called it a “lay-off” from the post-9-11 financial downturn. Whatever euphemism they offered, a year after starting my career and eight months after I joined the ranks of fatherhood, I was fired by the prestigious law firm for which I had entrusted the future of my family. I was a number – Attorney #2657 – and my hours were woefully inadequate to cover my exorbitant costs. I was an under-performing cog in the big law machine. It wasn’t my fault. I had taken every project offered. There just wasn’t enough work at the time. The fact that I had a new child at home and carried $80,000 in law school debt was not the firm’s problem. The younger associates lacked training and came with a high price tag after the tech boom led to exploding salaries. That all came crashing down as the New York economy withered under the pressures of the terrorist attack, which had all but decimated one of our firm’s biggest clients.
I didn’t call Melissa after receiving the news. I was too stunned and upset. Unlike how my life had unfolded during the prior year, when things were moving at warp speed, everything just stopped. It slowed to a halt as I came to grips as to what this all meant for me and my new family. After finally mustering up the courage to go home, Melissa welcomed me at the door with Madeline in her arms. I closed the door, collapsed into Melissa’s arms. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was drowning, that I was going down a dark black hole from which I would not be able to exit. My dreams of success were now relegated to mere survival.
I took a week to mourn, sulk, and panic. I had to endure. There was too much at stake. Melissa didn’t question me or pressure me. She had my back. I was anchored by Melissa’s steadfast belief that my confidence would return, a prediction I found curious because I had proven nothing to her about my ability to make it in a world that was growing increasingly grotesque by the day. As I had done earlier in our nascent marriage, I reverted to the practical and forged ahead and gritted my teeth. I applied for jobs all over the country, hoping to find one that clicked even though overpaid associates seeking work in the wake of a terrorist attack and subsequent financial crisis were not in high demand. At the same time, my belief in miracles and the power of prayer was restored as I asked God that some firm would take a second chance on me. Ninety resumes and a severe pay cut later, my prayers were answered, and one did.
We moved from one mid-sized Connecticut town, Norwalk, to an even more nondescript one, Manchester. We downsized from a 2-bedroom condo on the water to a corporate housing complex that bragged about its proximity to Hartford. The job started well but a few months in I was assigned to a case involving a well-known Wall Street brokerage house. It was to be a high-profile case and typical of the ones my prior firm had handled regularly. The client gave me some documents which I was asked to copy. I brought them to the firm’s copy center., which I mistakenly thought was protocol. It was the Copy Center after all. When I checked their status a few hours later, they claimed the documents were missing and that they didn’t have a record of me giving anything to them. For the second time in six months, I found myself about to be fired. I again prayed for a miracle, and they were answered two gut-wrenching days later after they were located after being mixed in with a box given to another attorney. I was offered a reprieve and a second chance.
Around the same time, Melissa was driving her old hand-me-down Audi when a fellow resident, high on some sort of barbiturate, crashed into her. With our family relegated to one car, I was now forced to take public transportation to work. I was late one morning and sprinted to catch the bus. I had a briefcase in one hand and a suit jacket in the other. I lost traction about 50 yards away when I saw the doors close. I did a face plant in the parking lot and sucked in the exhaust from the departing bus.
I didn’t get up immediately. I just lay there because for the first time in my life, I felt defeated. I had been President of a high school class that included the future captain of the U.S. Olympic Hockey Team (Ted Drury) and a future famous actor (Peter Sarsgaard). I had been voted most likely to succeed. I graduated with honors from Notre Dame and had passed 2 bar exams. Now I couldn’t even handle copying documents or catching a bus on time. Those kids with the French Foreign Legion hats and the other little asshole at Einstein Bagels were right: I was now a complete Fuck Up. The only feeling I had at that moment, while lying face down on the pavement, was that I wanted to end it all. Not just in a hyperbolic, but in an actual sort of way, but rather, in a “I’m taking my ball and going home,” way. Or, more bluntly, “I gave life a good shot and it really ain’t worth pursuing” manner.
Then, for some reason, a scene from the movie Wall Street popped into my head. Right before the Bud Fox character, played by Charlie Sheen, is arrested for insider trading, his boss, Louis, played by Hal Holbrook, delivers a masterful line I had written down and memorized while taking a Screenwriting class in college.
“Man looks into the abyss,” says Louis. “There’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”
I said, “Fuck it” and picked myself up. It wasn’t all that bad. There was another bus right behind the one I had just missed. When I took my seat, I was a changed man after lying on the pavement despondent and defeated. What I had gained was a sense of purpose. I had been embarrassed about getting married out of wedlock, of getting fired from my first job, and from nearly getting fired from my second. But these weren’t failures, and I was wrong for thinking of myself as a failure. If there was a miracle, it was that I realized that these unforeseen setbacks were gifts. My family was not something disconnected but central to who I was. Rather than set these gifts aside, I needed to do everything in my power to not let them go.
I approached work and home life with more vigor and focus than before. Through these collective challenges, our family started gaining an identity. I was working long hours at work. Melissa knew I had something to prove. Each day Melissa and Madeline would bring me my lunch. It became my saving grace. Mimi loved the carousel in the center of Bushnell Park, a beautiful tree-lined park which housed the Connecticut State Capitol and a vibrant homeless community. I would greet them in the park and pay the Armenian operator a $1 token before delicately placing Madeline on the ride as she went round and round like Earth’s orbit. Each turnabout would bring me joy, and but also sadness with the realization that she was getting older with each second. The fear of her presence was now replaced with the fear that she was one minute older, one minute closer to not needing me as much as I needed her.
I would return each day to our small apartment. One weekend afternoon, while on a walk with Madeline, I found a passageway between our apartment complex and a nearby residential community. It acted like a portal to a better life. Madeline and I would cross a small bridge and walk through the trees that divided the separate worlds represented by those who own versus those who rent. Once cleared, we would walk the sidewalks and admire the cookie cutter houses and clean-cut lawns. “This is where I was supposed to be,” I thought while clasping Madeline’s hand tighter and perusing the serene Americana neighborhood. Then I’d look at her face and be reminded that, “No. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
Melissa got a job working at the Wadsworth Museum gift shop on weekends. Despite possessing credentials which rivaled that of a Supreme Court clerk, she toiled away, hawking tchotchkes to old women and tour groups so that we could squirrel away a few more dollars, a requirement after my salary was reduced by forty percent. Every Saturday and Sunday, I would bring Madeline to roam the halls of one of the most underrated museums in the country. And it was there, when we had no money in our pocket, that the three of us dreamed naïve dreams of visiting Rome and Florence one day, where we could saunter through museums and soak in first-hand the masterpieces from artists the Wadsworth offered a glimpse of – Caravaggio, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
At work, I became a man on fire. After the setback of losing the client documents, I was assigned a trademark infringement case involving a replica of a Colt Single Action Army revolver, also known as the Peacemaker. I spent hours in the firm’s law library teaching myself a new area of the law. I pulled all-nighters. Melissa didn’t complain. She knew I was drafting something more than a legal opinion. I was composing my comeback story. The opportunity led to a career, which would take me to new jobs, new cities and new heights. And soon, trips to Italy to see the frescos and paintings Melissa and I had once dreamed about were not out of reach.
*****
The blare of trumpets signaled the slow methodical procession of Pope Francis’ entourage. The pressure from the throng enhanced our feelings of claustrophobia. Behind me was a tiny woman, around 60 years old and no more than 4’8 and 80 pounds. She carried a Brazilian flag and, over the course of our wait, tried unsuccessfully to maneuver around me to get a better view. She was pressing her fingers into my spine, and I continued to box out this little fireball. I would not budge. A bodyguard, who was middle-aged and had the frame of a sommelier at a Michelin Star restaurant rather than a bodyguard to a celebrity, looked at my daughters, smiled and stood in front of them. Pope Francis now entered our line of sight and was making his way towards the bald chaperone. The woman behind me resorted to climbing me like I was an oak tree and began screaming in my ear, “Papa Francesco! Papa Francesco!”
Pope Francis emerged and made his way down the aisle. He slowly proceeded, shaking hands, touching the worshippers, and waving at the spectators, many of whom clamored for a miracle encounter. As he came closer to where we were standing, even a skeptic like me began to see the light. He inched closer, smiled, and stopped before my daughters and the bald chaperone who had singled out my daughters, who stood mesmerized. Pope Francis reached out and grabbed our younger daughter’s hand. She clasped his with her other hand, engulfing them as if she wanted to absorb his entire heavenly presence. He grabbed her cheek with his other hand and blessed both of my daughters, each of whom beamed with intensity.
As I watched this remarkable life event unfold in a Vatican sanctuary, the only thing I could think of was …. Philip Rivers. A few months earlier, I came across an article on Rivers, the quarterback of my favorite professional sports team, the Los Angeles Chargers. He had talked about the phrase Nunc Coepi.
“In its purest form,” said Rivers during an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I guess it means ‘Now I begin.’ But it is a never-ending beginning. You are always beginning. Now I begin again and again and again.” It’s Christ’s Resurrection story applied to everyday life, and thus a religious philosophy I could embrace.
I had always struggled to believe not just in a Higher Being but also in myself, choosing to focus on the pragmatic rather than the transcendent, the myopic rather than the provident. I had feared the path that had been laid out before me, unsure of whether they were bricks in life’s ocean rather than my anchors. With his clasp of my daughters’ hands, Pope Francis was vicariously easing my own burdens of insecurity and self-doubt. I now saw my life for what it was, part of something greater than the individual. I did not feel guilty for failing to make this discovery until then. I felt comfort even as the woman behind me smashed her flesh against mine and yelled in my ear.
After looking at my children who were beaming from their brief but memorable encounter with the Pope, I turned to Melissa, who was radiant. She had always been more religious than me and our experience was neither a sign nor a symbol. It was life, one that was never a choice between miracles and the practical. Both came in a disorganized bundle called sacrifice. During our marriage I had focused on what I had given up, namely leisure for the sake of long hours. I had rarely thought about the losses that she had offered in return for this life: a sidetracked career and a family move from coast to coast so I could pursue higher pay and more prestige while also proving once-and-for-all that the first law firm that had fired me had been gravely mistaken.
But none of that mattered because in the end it was a life neither of us would give up. Past fears of what was ahead had been replaced by fears over what might not have been. And I realized that this is what I had wanted all along. This moment when the miraculous meets the practical, when the earthly mixes with the heavenly.
And then that moment was over. And Rivers was right.
Our lives were always beginning and ending. Small chapters that begin and end. They seem momentous at the time but when looked at collectively they are mere notes in our own personal symphony of which we are the conductors even if the baton is unwieldy and the score unfinished. Ending and then beginning. Beginning and then ending. And then beginning again. A never-ending cycle of ups and downs. Successes and failures. Victories and defeats. A life where you could spend years doubting whether you were on the right path only to realize with the Pope’s touch of your daughter’s face that you had never diverted. It was never God’s will but your destiny. And Nunc Coepi was not a mere phrase but the instrument that allowed you to keep going.