Crystal is the customary gift. I got dog drool

Thu, 25 Oct 2001 19:30:00 +0000

I slip off my wedding ring, which doesn't fit so snugly anymore, and add it to the plastic tray along with two hand-carved silver bracelets and one of copper, a heavy metal belt, a brass watch with lizards curling around the band and a necklace of flattened nails and vertebrae that a friend brought me back from Africa. I step through the metal detector.

On my wedding day, 15 years ago today, I wore the same body armor, along with French garters, but that time I didn't take it off. I lit up the scanner's alert panel to the highest number: 10.

Stephen and I were married in a maximum security prison. He had written a novel while finishing up a 20-year sentence for bank robbery, and the manuscript had landed on my desk when I was writer-in-residence at a Canadian university. I fell in love -- with his writing on the first page, with him, before first sight. All I had left to do was to meet the man.

I wrote to Stephen, in my official writer capacity. My opinion was that his book should be published. I wrote later the same day offering to work as his editor. I wrote a third letter asking if he needed anything -- books, paper, pens. In the last letter I sent that afternoon I wrote, "P.S. Will you marry me?"

Salon.com > Susan Musgrave

Crystal is the customary gift. I got dog drool