David and I met in the fall of 1978 in the least romantic place imaginable: a hardware store in Akron, Ohio. I was twenty-three, standing in front of a display of weatherstripping, completely uncertain about which kind I needed for the drafty door of my apartment.
A man in the next aisle noticed I was confused. Without making a big deal of it, he said, “The foam usually works better than felt for exterior doors around here.”
I told him I wasn’t sure mine technically counted as an exterior door because it opened into a shared hallway.
He actually stopped to think about that.
Seriously.
As if the distinction mattered.
Then he said,
“Probably split the difference. Get the medium-density one.”
And then he walked away.
I bought the medium-density weatherstripping.
I also stayed in the aisle for several extra minutes, hoping he might return.
He didn’t.
But a week later, I saw him again in the same store.
He recognized me immediately.
“Did the weatherstripping work?”
I admitted I hadn’t installed it yet.
He offered to help.
His name was David Mercer.
He was twenty-six, worked as an electrician, and had the kind of quiet competence that made complicated things seem simple.
That evening, he repaired my apartment door.
I made him dinner with whatever I happened to have in the refrigerator.
He stayed until nearly eleven.
Then he returned the following weekend.
And the weekend after that.
We married in June of 1980 in my parents’ backyard.
Neither of us wanted a large ceremony.
We weren’t people who needed extravagance.
Afterward, we bought an old house in Cuyahoga Falls that turned out to require far more work than the listing had suggested.
David loved it.
Fixing things was simply part of who he was.
Over the next forty-four years, he repaired the plumbing, roof, furnace, fence, appliances, windows, floors, and almost anything else that stopped working.
He never did it to impress anyone. He genuinely enjoyed figuring out why something was broken and making it right again.
He also never allowed me to carry anything heavy.
Groceries.
Boxes.
Furniture.
If I reached for something, David was already taking it from me.
It wasn’t because he thought I was incapable.
It was simply how he loved people.
Our daughter, Karen, was born in 1983.
She grew into a woman with David’s patience and my stubbornness, which made her incredibly capable and occasionally exhausting.
