A Love Bigger Than My Dreams

The night I first saw one of my books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, I celebrated by buying this digital painting for my office.

Its unique content makes me nostalgic—especially today. It’s my twenty-second wedding anniversary, and this subject matter captures my marriage well. For more than two decades, Crystal has endured being married to a dreamer. She’s wedded to someone who literally dreams of going to space and who figuratively shoots for the stars.

She’s kissed me goodbye before I left for writing sabbaticals to write three different books. She’s told me to “spend the money” (more than I paid for either of our daily drivers) to hire experts to help those books get published and promoted. She’s squeezed me in a hug before I set out for Antarctica, for wingwalking on a WWII-era biplane, and for mountains so remote I carried a satellite tracking device. She’s welcomed me home from every continent and from hope-fueled business trips all over the country.

Crystal is a lot of what “home” means to me.

She’s driven me home from the hospital and sat with me after moments of failure. She has encouraged me after embarrassments that still replay in my thoughts while I’m driving, showering, or trying to fall asleep at night. She has never reminded me that I lost $50,000 and incurred $50,000 more in unexpected bills from a pair of real estate “deals.” She doesn’t bring up that I drew the blueprints of our current home, which has cracked apart in literally a dozen places. When I’ve made mistakes in my freelance gig that’ve cost us thousands of dollars, I always absorb far more sympathy than criticism.

When this astronaut has fallen back to earth, she’s been there to give me a hug, run her fingers through my hair, and offer to pray for me. I’ve not splashed down into an ocean in a capsule, but I’ve collapsed into her expansive forgiveness.

I’m not done dreaming. In fact, my dreams prove far more ambitious now than any I held when she said, “I do,” on a Maryland beach. I’m not the man she married, but she has adapted to every version of me.

Someday, she might be married to an actual space traveler—and not someone who only reads the memoirs of astronauts and their wives. If I never make it to space, I’ll die knowing I spent my life with a woman whose love was bigger than even my dreams.