The Five Best Sounds I’ve Ever Heard

Ah, hearing. It's such an underrated sense. Vision and taste are the all-stars of the five senses. Smell and hearing are the second-class citizens. Touch, obviously, is the red-headed stepchild.

Hearing, though, gets a big boost in the rankings when you have a baby. In fact, two of the best five sounds I’ve ever heard have been in the past 12 weeks. What were they? Well, let’s cover all five. And to do that, we’ll start at the top, PB, or, pre-baby:

Sound 1: The first time you hear the ocean. The waves crashing on the rocks. The tide rushing against the sand. The seagulls overhead. Since I was little, I’ve always loved the ocean and everything that comes with it. The first time you hear it is unforgettable. And now, decades later, the sound of it can still bring me back to my childhood.

Sound 2: The first real concert you ever attend. I actually didn’t experience a concert until I was in college and wasn’t sure what to expect the first time I stood wide-eyed in front of a live show. I loved the mood. I loved the crowd. I loved the anticipation. Then Bruce Springsteen made a sound on a New Jersey stage and I was captivated for life. Live music has been a huge part of my life – and our marriage.

Sound 3: The first time you hear “I do.” Speaking of marriage, those two words are pretty damn important. You spend a lot of your life looking for the right person to share everything with and, suddenly, two words stand in between you and forever. I remember nearly everything about our wedding day – the food, the people, the speeches, and the weather. Mostly, though, I remember that moment.

Sound 4: The first time you hear your child cry. After the first time, it gets really old … kidding, kidding. Kind of. But that first piercing yell, which I imagine is usually muffled by screams of maternal pain (it was in our case), lets you know you have a healthy (and loud) little bundle of joy.

Sound 5: The first time you hear your child laugh. This …

Kindling in Harvard Yard, or How We Really Met

Earlier this week, on the 4th, in fact, I was chatting with Bridget's good friend, Laura. We sat out on our deck, sipped beer, listened to Bruce Springsteen (well, we should have been) and talked about meeting and falling in love. Not us, of course. Just the idea. (Bridget was inside booking our latest vacation.)

Laura told me the story about her parents and how they fell in love. In a nutshell (and forgive me if I'm butchering this at all, Laura), her parents, both starry-eyed singles at the time, were both on a cruise somewhere in Europe. It was the last night of the trip and, as luck would have it, there was one bottle of champagne left on the ship. They both reached for it at the same time, locked eyes, and said, "Well, we might as well drink this together." A  Transatlantic, long distance relationship ensued and decades later, they are still together today. Wonderful, right? Sweet, wholesome, and warm.

It got me thinking about the beginnings of me and Bridget and, well, it's not very good. It's actually fairly clunky. This stinks because people -- and our children will, at some point -- ask, "How did you guys meet?"And up to this point, we tell some variation of this:

Bridget and I worked together, but didn't really know each other. Then she worked remotely for a bit, got a new job, and lived in Baltimore for a few years. So you could say, we'd heard of each other, but that was it. In 2010, we started chatting at our mutual friend Kate's birthday party in Salem and realized we got along pretty well. Then, taking full advantage of the romance of technology, we started Facebook chatting, texting, and dating. Romantic, right? Not so much. Clunky. Pretty lame paragraph if you ask me.

And I've decided it's time to officially change it. To what, you ask? To Kindling in Harvard Yard!

As we started dating in the summer of 2010, we realized we both liked to be outside and we both liked to read. Our weekend afternoons quickly became filled with slow, slightly awkward walks down Oxford St. with our Kindles in our hands. We'd sit for hours and split the time between reading, talking, and people watching. (Our book choices were and are always quite different -- she recently polished off 50 Shades of Grey in about 45 minutes and I just finished a great baseball read called The Bullpen Gospels.) Today, we share many hobbies -- running, blogging, drinking good wine, eating good food, to name a few -- but Kindling in Harvard Yard is still our favorite. And really, as I thought more about it, that stands out as how we really met and how we fell in love.

So the next time someone asks -- or the first time I tell my son or daughter about it -- I'm going to take a page out of Laura's parents' book. (Pun not intended. Okay, maybe it a was a little ...). Here goes:

"You see, son, we were both walking around Harvard Yard one sunny, Saturday afternoon. Then, out of the corner of our eyes, we saw a single Kindle resting on a purple chair. We both thought it was ours, so we reached for it at the same time, locked eyes, and said, 'Well, we might as well read this together.' And the rest is history ..."

Yeah, I like that much better.