Insight: Beyond My Wildest Dreams

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

There’s an old Kris Kristofferson song called “Please Don’t Tell Me How The Story Ends,” and for me, it perfectly sums up where I’ve been for the past 20 years.

Nancy and Ed Pierce by Lake Ontario in 2006.
COURTESY PHOTO 

Back in 2004, I had been living in the same one-bedroom apartment for almost a decade, had been single for 13 years and poured myself into work because I had very little else going on. At the age of 50, it was depressing to come home each time to an empty apartment without much optimism for the future.

Then my life was totally turned upside down. Some of my co-workers at the newspaper I worked for thought that I should try internet dating and asked if they could create a profile for me. I reluctantly agreed but after a negative experience, I edited out much of the personal details from my listing. All that remained listed my gender, my age and the city I lived in. I thought nobody in their right mind would answer that ad and that my internet dating participation would come to an end.

Was I ever wrong. A woman living in the next town over sent me a note late in the month of May and asked how I could ever expect to get to know someone based upon the scant info that I had put out there on my listing. I answered her note with a lengthy reply about who I was, what my occupation was, and some of my likes and dislikes. I fully expected that to be the end of it and went back to my normal routine.

That evening, I received a reply, and it intrigued me. First, this woman could express herself in an email and she could spell correctly. I learned that she was an elementary school teacher and had moved to my area recently. We had similar tastes in music, food, politics, movies and a mutual love of ice cream.

Exchanging numerous emails, I learned that she had been divorced after 23 years of marriage and had three grown sons. She was originally from Burlington, Vermont and had a college degree in education from the University of Vermont. I looked forward to each subsequent email from her, and each one I received from her was the highlight of my day.

Before we ever shared photos of what we looked like, we had a few long telephone conversations, and I asked her if she would like to go out on a date with me. She thought that would be nice and agreed to meet me at a Friendly’s Restaurant after work on a Thursday. I pulled into the restaurant parking lot in my 1995 Pontiac Firebird and wondered how this would go. A few minutes later, a huge blue 1985 Ford Bronco pulled in next to me and this attractive woman stepped out wearing a handmade sign around her neck that read “Hi Ed.”

It broke the icy nervousness of meeting for the first time and as we sat down at a table in the restaurant, I started to realize how much I liked everything about her. She ordered vanilla ice cream, had sparkling blue eyes, lots of freckles and reddish-brown short hair. But the most important thing about her that I noticed was her incredible sense of humor and sense of sarcasm that matched mine perfectly.

Simply put, it was the best first date of my life, and we made plans to do something else again soon. We spoke on the phone for the next four days, but on the fifth day, she told me that I probably wasn’t going to want to date her anymore. She told me that she had found a lump in her breast and was going to have surgery after having been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Being a cancer survivor myself, I did my best to reassure her that she would be OK and that I wouldn’t give up on her so easily. Over the following weeks, I spent a lot of time at her apartment bringing her vanilla milkshakes and making sure that kept her spirits up. I went with her to her radiation and chemotherapy treatments. And I met her youngest son, Danny, who spent several weeks with her that summer to assist as she recovered from her surgery.

The longer I knew her, the closer I felt to her. She has three brothers and a sister, and one of her brothers, Rick, lived nearby and had played guitar for a band I liked in the 1980s called “Dr. Hook.” Meeting him for the first time, he asked me to rattle off how many Dr. Hook songs I could name, and he also asked me if my hair was real. I laughed as I had never been asked previously if my hair was my own, and it certainly is.

By that Christmas in 2004 she had moved in with me and brought along her dog. We were married on June 11, 2005, and our life together has now included homes and jobs in Florida, New Hampshire and Maine.

It’s said that love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place and that rings true for me. I am perhaps the luckiest man ever to have found Nancy.