Hilton Head Island: the reasons for marriage

I came across the above photo a few days ago.  

For many years I carried a cropped version focused on Carol in my wallet.  Somehow it was lost along the way.  The photo was taken at Notre-Dame de Paris a few months after we were married in Key West in August of 1994.  Carol is the one on the left.  

I present the photo as irrefutable proof that I did not marry Carol for her money.  In fact when we married I had more than she.  However she soon caught up and then went far ahead.   Carol is one of you.  A most successful one of you.  I am something else. Who knows what?  She now makes more in a year than I have in a lifetime.  So I am among the affluent by proximity.  But I am among the very wealthiest on the planet because I have had control for fifty years of that most finite of resources:  my own time.  And because while I enjoy that which Carol’s success brings, including sitting at this moment on this screened porch overlooking Skull Creek,  I need so little.  One of the few who have known me since the 70s, another intelligent and successful woman, observed a year or so ago that if I had not met Carol I probably would not be alive today.  I expect that is true.  But if I were still alive and had to live on my own resources, I would now be on GANNET at sea or some distant anchorage living as well as I do here on Hilton Head Island.  I still receive royalties from Amazon each month.  Usually from several different Amazon countries.  Last month I got $0.09 from Amazon Australia.  How I earned 9 cents I do not know.

All my relationships with women began with lust.  Some turned into more.  I wonder how the lives of those desirable and intelligent women have evolved.  I hope well.

With Carol lust became love, however difficult to define.

It is likely that we passed on the streets around Harvard Square a few years earlier without noticing one another.

I know that meeting her in 1994 was the great grace of my life.