.png)
2 hours ago
3
On Grady Harris’s wedding day, his father, a Presbyterian preacher, presided over the vows. “And when my father told us to kiss, and we did, I felt a sense of joy that I’d never felt before,” Harris says. “I’ve had a life full of happiness … But that was a new joy.”
Harris was 60, and marrying for the first time. Now 69, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Marcia Wood, 66, who has an art gallery in the city. At times, their relationship must have seemed unlikely – 12 years separated their first and second dates, and they met by chance through a long chain of friends of friends.
“Coincidence is about as close to magic as we get in the real world,” Harris says.
All his life, he had moved around. In childhood, the family followed his father’s ministry. When Harris – “the only son of an only son of an only son” – was seven, they moved to the Brazilian highlands, “about 200km past where the paved road ended”. He loved reading adventure stories. “I had a horse and my folks would encourage me to just head off,” he says.
In adulthood, he kept on moving. He left college and hitchhiked – “the usual adventure”. The list of jobs lengthened: bicycle mechanic, security guard, stints on farms, at a furniture factory in Michigan, an ice-cream factory in Georgia, a spice factory in Maryland.
Through it all, Harris played guitar and sang in a band called Two Legs. “We did have some hope, delusion … of it being a thing,” he says. Each job or place he lived felt provisional. “Well, this is good for now. But I am a musician. One day I’ll get paid for it.”
In his 30s, to keep a relationship going, he moved to Germany, and when that fizzled out, to the Czech Republic, where he taught English, before returning to the US in his 40s. His parents were getting older, so was he, and he wanted a job to build a pension.
When he got a position at Emory University, near his parents’ home, the phone kept ringing for the woman Harris was replacing. One day the woman herself called, they discovered a mutual acquaintance and she connected Harris to old school friends, and an art crowd in Atlanta – among them, Wood. They went on a date.
The role, and all that came with it, was the start of something new for Harris – and an end to the moving around.
For the first time in his life, he earned enough to live alone. “And it was extraordinary … Money is an incredible insulator,” he says. “The lack of it makes you very vulnerable. Not having a career meant no dependable income, no pension building.”
For a while, he enjoyed the freedom of solitude. He and Wood would see each other around. Neither pushed for another date.
One night, 12 years after the first date, Harris attended a retrospective Wood had organised at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Georgia. When they hugged in greeting, Wood’s hand lingered on Harris’s cashmere jacket. Along with living alone, he was also, he says, “the first owner of most of my clothes for the first time in my adult life”. He asked her out.
“I admired her … I get infatuated easily, but love takes time,” Harris says.
Four years later, it was Wood who asked Harris if he wanted to marry. She had to be sure she wanted marriage herself … so he waited till she knew. They wed in Harris’s parents’ back yard in Florida.
For most of Harris’s adult life, lasting commitment “hadn’t been a possibility”. Wood was “the first person with whom I thought I could live with for a long time. That whatever our frictions – and we do argue – that our arguments wouldn’t be the end of it,” Harris says. “She is my bulwark.”
He’s had the same job for 25 years and doesn’t miss moving around. “Living with Marcia is an adventure. I guess that sounds pat. But it’s true. Living well with someone is a challenge. Not because of them, but because of oneself …”
