When I set out to write it, I assumed I’d start with my first awakener and proceed from there, only to discover a prelude leading up to that main event, an antechamber of wishes, both my mother’s and my own, which is where the story actually begins. My mother once told me that as a young girl she’d lie in bed conjuring the man she would someday marry. Where was he at that exact moment? What was he thinking about? What did he look like? When would they meet? Sometimes she’d sneak into the backyard and wrap her arms around a tree, for practice. She met her fate in February 1968, the month she turned twenty-four, at a Pennsylvania ski resort. They spied each other in line for the chairlift: a cute guy with curly hair and an adorably wrong white silk scarf (he grew up in North Carolina and had never been skiing); a curvy brunette in a kelly-green snow-suit (from New England, she was used to the slopes). Later, back at the lodge, they flirted over hot cocoa and discovered that they both lived in Washington, DC, where she worked for the just-founded Job Corps, and he was an Army intelligence officer, studying Mandarin Chinese.
