Today I am bringing back an old entry, written by Bruce. I love his perspective, and recent conversations with some of my very special former students has had me thinking about the time in our life that we can look back upon, knowing that we were living in our “hungry years”, but also that we were blissfully unaware of how different things would be (for the better) once we established ourselves. Please enjoy this very special entry written by my favorite guest blogger.

Recently, I was listening to an interview with an older male actor (exactly who he is doesn’t much matter to the story here, plus most readers wouldn’t even know who the hell he is anyway), and in it he referred to his “hungry years”. By this he meant the early years of his marriage, when his career had not yet taken off, and so times were lean for him and his wife. When asked if he looked upon this time negatively he responded that they were actually some of the best times of his life, as he was still so young and naive, and didn’t fully grasp the struggles he was enduring. This made me think about our own “hungry years” in the early years of our relationship, and when I mentioned it to Rennie she felt it might be an interesting topic for the blog. The catch was that since I was the one that brought it up, I’d have to write it. So here it goes…

In the summer of 1998, after dragging my feet for the first three and a half years of our relationship (not to mention the fact that we had been such close friends for over seven years), Ren and I finally moved into our very own apartment. It was a beautiful place in a brand new development in North Brunswick, one town over from Rutgers University (where we’d met), and while it might have appeared to those that saw it that we had it all together, it wasn’t really the truth. Like most couples in their 20s, we were still finding our place in the world. Both of our careers were still in their infancies, and while Ren had spent the early years of our relationship working a high-paying retail job, that lifestyle just could not be sustained. The stress it was putting on her mind and her body, as well as our relationship, was too much to bear. A few short months before we moved into our new place she’d made the move out of retail, but there was a price to be paid for the more humane lifestyle…a huge pay cut. At the same time, I was working at my first “real” job out of college, and was finding it hard to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. So while we weren’t anywhere near the poverty level, we certainly weren’t living in the lap of luxury either. But we had each other, and considering everything that had to happen just for us to end up together in the first place, I often felt like I was living in a dream that someone would be waking me up from at any moment. I had zero complaints.

This one is from the “really hungry years”, before we even lived together.

With no money to do anything all-that-exciting, we quickly stumbled upon what would become our usual weekend routine. On Friday nights, we’d start with dinner at whatever “gourmet” chain restaurant we had a coupon for that week (Applebee’s, Chili’s, Bennigan’s, etc.), and then follow that up with a leisurely stroll through Target, where we hoped we could cobble enough cash together to buy the things we actually needed for the new palatial Rankin/Leighton estate. Once done, we’d come home and watch the ever so thrilling “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” and whatever else we could find on the basic cable package we were lucky enough to be able to afford. Saturdays and Sundays were much the same, but since we’d already splurged on one meal out, Ren would cook…and often with food we’d lifted from my parents’ pantry the last time we’d visited them. Crazy stuff.

The spacious kitchen from our first place. It was bigger than some of the places Ren lived in by herself before we moved in together.

There’s one memory from this period that is still so vivid to me that I almost feel as if I’m traveling back in time when I think of it. It was a Saturday night in December 1999, and we’d recently booked our wedding in Las Vegas for the following April. Christmas and Hanukkah decorations lit up our apartment, and we were spending our weekend the way we’ve always loved to…talking, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company and the life we’d built (or were building). As the evening got later, we both drifted off to sleep in our living room, with Ren on the couch and me in the recliner. Sometime after midnight I awoke to the sounds of Beck performing his song “Mixed Bizness” on Saturday Night Live, and I looked over to see Ren peacefully asleep. I then slowly panned around the apartment that was so unmistakably “us”, smiled and then marveled at how perfect everything was in that one moment. A moment that could have easily been innocuous and forgettable ended up perfectly capturing that exact time in our life.

Our very first Christmas tree in our very own apartment. Together.

The most beautiful thing about those hungry years was that we were so young and that simply placing down our roots together, on our own (except the usual raiding of my mom’s pantry) felt truly blissful. Now with hindsight being 20/20, we can look back on the years of living paycheck to paycheck and understand how much we struggled and how we always made do with what we had…because we had each other. We now recognize that even though we were struggling then, there was no preparing us for the real battle that had not yet presented itself to us: life together with Multiple Sclerosis.  

Taken on Ren’s 29th birthday, just shy of two years before her MS symptoms first presented.

Now, with over two decades together to look back upon, it’s easy to recognize the times that weren’t so easy…even if at the time they seemed oh-so-normal. But as with many things in our life, there’s the time before MS, and the time after MS. That line of demarcation provides all the perspective we’ll ever need to realize that even though we had good times, and we had bad times…we had times. Times together, which is all that really matters, even if you’re hungry.

This summer we ventured back to the very spot that I first saw Ren walking across campus. We’d just graduated high school, and were attending summer orientation before starting our freshman year at Rutgers.