December 25, 1991 —  Tempe, Arizona

Act One: Prologue: Negotiating a Difficult Marriage and Ph.D. Program

On that Christmas morning, he was alone in a small, dim apartment on the southern edge of Mill Avenue, about two miles from the sprawling, rose-hued buildings of Arizona State University. His second wife, Antonia, the Grinchette—mercurial and thirty—had left him in late August 1991, setting off on the last of the "hippie bus" lines, The Green Tortoise. A vintage, meandering bus would eventually bring her back to her parents' rundown house in the otherwise upscale town where Hemingway was born. Soon after she left, he boxed up and shipped her remaining things. Weeks later, she filed for divorce—a decision that was overdue, coming five years after they first got together and two-and-a-half after their quick courthouse wedding in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. In the spring of 1989, he was thirty-six, the younger son of a Holocaust survivor, and newly admitted to Arizona State's Social Science Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. When he accepted, he told Antonia—whose extended family was deeply rooted in Chicago—that they faced a crossroads: she could stay close to family and part amicably, or they could get married and start something new together. After a few days of thought, she agreed to marry and move with him to Arizona. He drove to Tempe in late July, ahead of her and their belongings, to find an apartment. From the outset, ominous signs appeared. Driving through the Ozarks, his 1982 Chevy Chevette's engine blew a cylinder, leaving the already anemic power train shuddering and struggling. Fearing it wouldn't restart, he kept it running at every gas stop, buying more oil en route —the car was burning through it fast. The nearly 1,800-mile journey took over thirty hours in the struggling subcompact, his eyes eventually blurring from exhaustion. When he finally arrived and turned off the ignition, the car exhaled its final, rattling breath, never to start again, a potential talisman of future events.

Summer in the Valley of the Sun was relentless. By late July, temperatures at dawn hovered near 90 degrees; by mid-afternoon, they soared past 110.  Antonia didn't join him until late September—two months after his arrival and well over a month into the semester. From the moment she landed at Sky Harbor Airport, he could sense her ambivalence, trailing into resentment.  Her immediate network of family and friends was gone. The culture was unfamiliar, the commutes longer, and the apartment darker, lacking Chicago's airy light and seasonal greenery. And his attention was swallowed up by the demands of graduate school.

Looking back, he came to realize that he had married a version of Rebecca Howe, a main character from the popular 1980s-early 1990s NBC sitcom, Cheers. Ambition without sufficient discipline, an adamant sense of entitlement divorced from the necessary sacrifices that achievement demands, notions of self-worth grounded in symbols of material success, Antonia was an insecure woman who compulsively adopted a myriad of self-improvement or creative efforts, only to serially and impulsively ditch them.  Even when Antonia plowed through obstacles to achieve a goal, such as earning a MBA (Masters in Business Administration), more than two decades later, the achievement was arguably a Pyrrhic victory, for two reasons. First, the market for a fifty-something newly minted MBA would have been thin to nonexistent. And, secondly, earning that degree must have drained Antonia's finances, signifying a misalignment between her aspirations and the reality that her peak earning years were behind her. Like Rebecca Howe, Antonia had a history of making bad choices. And that extended backwards in time to her decision to marry the PhD aspirant.

Decades later, she wrote in a blog post that her twenty-two months in metro Phoenix was an “ill-fated choice. My gut instinct told me to run.” Her internal struggle—between instinct and commitment—played out in several keys. In early October 1989, she urged him to withdraw from the program and return to Chicago. After speaking with his academic advisor and weighing the consequences, he decided to stay the course. Another pattern emerged: she began taking frequent, extended trips with her spendthrift, quasi-grifter parents through the Southwest. Unsurprisingly, she picked up short-term jobs that enabled her to leave for weeks. He didn't object. Then came the emotional eating. Both turned to food—fat, salt and sugar—in a futile attempt to bury their stress. Finally, there were outbursts—episodes that revealed the tension between her gut and her commitment. She could be volatile, lashing out verbally and physically. She was the only woman who ever hit him, maybe hoping for a reaction he never gave. She would punch through doors or slam her fist into drywall. These episodes could erupt anywhere, at any time, often with no warning. He remembered one afternoon when they were walking with his best friend and the friend's late wife. Something—he never knew what—set Antonia off. On the corner of Mill and University, Antonia's temper publicly exploded. The escalating tension inevitably led to the divorce, finalized in February 1992.

Act Two: Bardo (Crisis, Transition, Liminality)

Throughout the Fall of 1991, he was left with mixed feelings about her departure. Money was always tight as a graduate student, and now his finances were stretched even thinner. He moved into a smaller, almost cave-like apartment. The toxic interpersonal dynamics were gone, and he was free to focus on his studies, but any sense of connection to Chicago vanished with her. The darkness of the narrow second-floor apartment on South Mill Avenue, with its chocolate-colored carpet, café con leche walls, and a meager sliver of outdoor light, matched his disposition. The Ph.D. program’s concurrent demands—prepping for comprehensive exams, continuing undergraduate teaching responsibilities, and selecting a dissertation topic—generated a tension that was simultaneously bracing and overwhelming, the possibility of collapse and failure hung over him like Damocles’ sword.

The graduate faculty, content to rely on cheap post-graduate candidate labor, consumed with the primacy of their research and the intense gender politics within the department, offered little more than perfunctory platitudes instead of actual guidance. Hanging in the air was a durable, unstated assumption that dissertation methods and topics clone the chosen graduate faculty objects of interest. For a true interdisciplinary explorer, such as he was, pursuing what was sold to him as an interdisciplinary Ph.D., toeing a narrow disciplinary line was untenable. At semester's end, he was between identities—no longer a starry-eyed first-year graduate student, not yet even a provisional peer, he was, for that season, tenuously suspended in a personal and academic Bardo. With its focus on comity and togetherness, the holiday season heightened his sense of isolation and disconnection. Yet, these five weeks of solitude were an opportunity to think, explore, recognize, and pursue a compelling idea, free from distraction or compromise.

Act Three: An Unexpected Discovery

On that crisp, bright, and early Christmas Day 1991, he scrutinized his Zenith computer, searching for a new direction. He had been researching online three years before the first viable web browser, Netscape, and almost a decade before Google's birth. The World Wide Web was more a concept than a reality. It was an America Online world, a DOS world. DOS was a text-based operating system that, with the right software, let him connect to the primitive internet using a 56K modem and a phone line. Access was anything but fast, easy, or ubiquitous. That morning, the dark emptiness of the apartment retreated. Angst was stripped away by a hunch, a sense of imminent opportunity. He brewed a pot of coffee, set a mug next to the Zenith, and settled in.

The department had a license for Lexis/Nexis, which was a primary pay-walled database of legal and news sources. He knew no one would call him that morning, and no one else would be using the database. He had the line and the database to himself. At that time, the Justice Studies program increasingly emphasized identity politics, an ideological wave sweeping over academia. His instincts pointed in a different direction, toward the economic decline and displacement that began in 1973. He wanted to investigate how the ongoing withering of the mid-twentieth Century American middle class was portrayed as both a disaster and a recuperative opportunity at the end of the Cold War. As the modem’s electronic handshake went through its cantankerous choreography—a dueling series of beeps, followed by hisses and screeches—his query generated results, as sequentially numbered synopses crawled, line-by-line, across the etched black screen of the CRT monitor. At first glance, the varied sources—policy papers, editorials, book reviews, and print and television news item—yielded unsurprising results. As he sifted through the full texts, two terms, "Saturn" and "Golden Age," unexpectedly recurred. In diverse contexts, from evocations of the 1960s space race to automobile industry reports, political speeches, and cultural criticism, a pattern emerged that could not be mere coincidence. Something in the collective consciousness tapped mythic signifiers to make sense of the emerging, post-industrial digital age. Given his preexisting interest in the social lives of signs—semiotics—he “saw the light.” He was having a "Rick Rubin" moment. As Rubin writes in The Creative Act: A Way of Being, these moments are worth noticing:

Intuitively, he’d already answered the first question. The second question, exploring the linkages between these ancient and cross-cultural iterative signs and the America of the 1990s, became the dissertation’s object of analysis.

By New Year's Day 1992, his tenuous season in Bardo gave way to a focused, creative period. He had the trajectory for his dissertation, a lens through which to explore the historical roots and contemporary use of these two signifiers, Saturn and the Golden Age, across transformative eras. He carried this energy into the Spring 1992 semester, open to further encounters with the unexpected.

Act Four: The Unexpected Redux

Friday, January 17, 1992, Tempe, Arizona

On the path to earning his ABD (All But Dissertation) status, he needed a graduate-level statistics course. The catch? His department didn't offer one. He ended up in a Sociology statistics section, taught by a legendary hypochondriac—a man whose obsession with personal sicknesses and epidemiology was matched only by his near double-digit number of marriages. The department had long since stopped buying him wedding gifts; he was the Larry King of the college, a punchline with tenure.

Friday afternoon classes had a rhythm all their own. After noon, the campus felt abandoned. Professors scattered, students vanished into weekend plans or part-time jobs, and the few who remained were less constrained by routine. The air was looser, the mood half-dreamlike.

Still buzzing from his holiday revelation, he strode into class in a white suit. The room housed two camps: a cohort of Justice Studies Master's and Ph.D. students, and a lively crew of Sociology graduate students, mostly Chicanos. Their warmth and humor set the tone—especially Pancho, Pete, and a short, blonde woman, Roxy. She wore burgundy leggings, her face round and open, her eyes deep brown, her hands adorned with rings, and her ankles adorned with bracelets. When their eyes met across the classroom, and smiled, something registered, not just attraction, but a type of recognition. He found her deeply charismatic.

After class, conversation spilled into the hallway and then to an outdoor café. Stories flowed. Roxy was 36, raised in Madera, California, the daughter of a Mexican American father and an Anglo mother. She was a descendant of a famous Mexican revolutionary. Roxy had five kids. One accompanied her to Tempe. Divorced for six years, she hadn't dated since the mid-'80s. More than an hour passed before she said, "Come back with me. There's something I want to show you."

Her apartment on Lemon Street was cozy and comfortable. She led him to a corner where a top hat, blanket, fireplace tools, black clothes, and other ironwork sat in a deliberate jumble. She donned the hat, smiling: "In the '80s, I was a chimney sweep," she announced. She showed him the tools, explained the work, and told him how she eventually sold her business—Cinderfella. As he left, he asked for her number. She gave it to him.

Returning to his apartment, he began reading the cardinal short story in Raymond Carver's anthology, "Where I'm Calling From." Three pages in, he froze: a female chimney sweep appears, prepping her tools inside a Central Valley California house. Carver described everything—the hat, the blanket, the tools, the choreography—precisely as he’d seen and heard it in Roxy’s living room. Carver's initial portrait ended on the next page, with this line: “The young woman’s name was Roxy.”

He stared at the page, startled. What were the odds? It seemed well-nigh impossible. He meets Roxy, an ex-chimney sweep, in a graduate-level statistics class, then returns to his apartment, opens a book, and less than ninety minutes after their first goodbye, finds in Carver's signature story a description of her tools, energy, and disposition described in uncanny detail. If his dissertation topic's birth was akin to a persistent itch scrolling across a CRT screen, this unexpected convergence was like a lightning strike. After a stunned minute, he excitedly called her. Roxy was surprised to hear from him so soon. He asked her to listen to sections of what he had just read. When Carver's passage ended with the aforementioned line —"The young woman's name was Roxy"—she was floored, dumbfounded.

For Roxy, it wasn't solely the immediate, wild coincidence. What stunned Roxy was this: it was how Carver depicted her, as confident, skilled, and magnetic. She had never viewed herself that way. Roxy's parents, especially her mother, hadn't either. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, she was taught that female beauty was vanity and confidence was a sin. Her first husband, a Witness, never told her she was powerful or beautiful. After her willing excommunication from that cult, even as she built a new sense of self, the old self-concept endured. For Roxy, Carver's rendering of her was unrecognizable.

Roxy wondered how Carver so clearly characterized her in the midst of some of the most trying years of her life. Months later, her date told her that while at work, she was free from the damage inflicted by the cult and early marriage. Her father, a former Golden Glove boxer, probation officer, and Toastmaster, taught her public speaking; with her natural charisma, she could charm customers and run the show. She was in control and admired for her skill and warm and expansive presence. That's what Carver caught. It's what her future husband recognized, from his seat in that classroom, those many years ago.

And so began their long, unpredictable partnership, spanning decades, encompassing breakups and reconciliations, cross-country moves and health scares, aging and disease, adding to the story and evidence of how lives leave their mark, tracing the shape of an American experience as the Twentieth Century came to end and new worlds emerged.

In his old age, he understood that both revelations, the academic insight on Christmas morning and the proximate, seemingly inexplicable Carver nexus, marked a defining juncture in his life. Synchronicities arose, potential patterns appeared, and they decided to act on them, individually and as a couple. Ultimately, such decisions shape the trajectory of lives public and private, revealing over time, the essential truth of a life.