An Uncomplicated Life
Page 30
EPILOGUE
Jillian and Ryan Get Engaged
I was happy-crying.
—JILLIAN
On the afternoon of December 19, 2013, my cell phone beeped with a message from the estimable Ryan Mavriplis. “Sir,” he said, “there is something I would like to talk to you about.”
I’ve known Ryan for nearly a decade, and he still calls me “sir.” I know what he wants to discuss. “I would like it if maybe we could go have a beer,” he says.
A month earlier, Ryan and Jillian had shopped for a ring setting in which to put a diamond that belonged to Ryan’s great-grandmother. They’d been together for more than nine years, the last year of which they’d shared an apartment. It was time.
Ryan’s uncle Rick worked in a jewelry store, so the shopping was easy. Ryan was serious that day. His gaze could have cut steel. Jillian, meanwhile, wouldn’t have needed a rocket to reach the moon. She could have jumped. She gazed at the display case with eyes like pie plates.
I picked up Ryan at their apartment at 5:30 p.m. “What do you want to talk about,” I asked. “How the Reds are going to do this year?”
“I always take care of your daughter, sir,” Ryan said. This was serious business. No time for joking.
“I’m glad about that,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”
After a big pull on his beer, Ryan got right to the point. “You know I love your daughter, right?”
“Yes, I believe I do.”
“And I love her and protect her.”
“Thank you.”
“She’s been my girlfriend for a long time.”
“Nine years, yes.”
“I would be very happy if you would allow me to marry her,” Ryan said.
I said, “Can I get back to you on that?”
“Oh,” Ryan said. “Okay.” He looked as if I’d backed my car over his foot.
“Ryan?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m joking. I’m thrilled you want to marry Jillian. I’d be proud to be your father-in-law.”
Then we talked about how the Cincinnati Bengals might do in Pittsburgh that weekend.
It was another of those emotional moments that lacked emotion. Everything builds, so when the crescendo arrives, it is satisfying, not loud. The little wins along the way were always more telling.
Ryan will make a fine son-in-law. He’s bright, open and inquisitive. He puts up with my consistent needling, a skill honed by years of observing athletes in locker rooms. If Ryan can hit my pitches, he’s ready for the majors.
I am reminded of a conversation we’d had a few years earlier at the vacation house in St. Augustine.
“Good morning, sir,” Ryan said. “What are you doing?”
I was on the laptop, paying bills.
“I’m paying bills,” I said.
“What bills are you paying?”
“Credit card bills.”
“For this house?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Why what!?”
“Why are you paying bills, sir?”
“Because if I don’t, they’ll lock me up.”
“What does that mean, sir?” Ryan knows what that means. He just wanted to keep talking.
“That means I won’t be able to pay for your wedding,” I said.
“My wedding?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, don’t get locked up,” Ryan said.
Later that same day, Ryan spied me on the front porch, scribbling notes in the margins of Buzz Bissinger’s book Father’s Day. It’s about Bissinger’s relationship with his son, Zach, who is mentally disabled.
“Why are you writing in your book, sir?” Ryan wanted to know.
“I’m inspired by something, for my book about Jillian,” I said.
“I’m gonna be in it, right?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to be famous, too?”
“Yeah. Fame by association.”
“What does that mean?” Ryan asked.
“That means get outta here so I can work.”
“Yes, sir,” Ryan said. He went back into the house. I heard him tell Jillian, “Honey, I’m gonna be famous.”
Some 18 months later, I am returning Ryan’s call to my cell phone.
“Got your message,” I said.
Ryan and Jillian knew they’d be an item from the very first. Their relationship reflected their worldview. No agendas, no guile. They may be special-needs people, but they had no special needs when it came to romance and commitment.
Thirty years earlier, I had not asked Sid Phillips if I could marry his daughter. I didn’t even ask Kerry in any proper way. I’d proposed over the telephone. It was a regretful thing to do.
That would never have occurred to Ryan Mavriplis. He is big on the formal touches. He likes the ceremonies. He never misses a chance to toast an occasion, or shake my hand, or call me “sir.” He would do this engagement business right.
The night after I gave him the okay, Ryan bought a bunch of flowers and put them in a vase on the coffee table of their apartment. Candles glowed on the kitchen table. He made a spaghetti dinner. When Jillian arrived home from her job in the athletic department at Northern Kentucky University, Ryan got down on one knee.
“He was holding something behind his back,” Jillian recalled a few months later.
“I gave her a speech,” Ryan said. “I said I want to be with you because I love you so, so much. I will protect you. Jillian Phillips Daugherty, will you marry me, please?”
Jillian said yes.
“I was happy-crying,” she said.
Some 18 months earlier, Jillian and I sat on the deck of our house, having another talk about her impending move. She happy-cried then, too. Independence is nothing if not competing pulls of the heart. I asked her what she loved about Ryan.
“He can really make a girl laugh,” she said. She would say almost exactly the same thing after she accepted Ryan’s proposal. “He’s funny, he’s honest, he’s smart.”
Their life together isn’t guaranteed. There’s no way to know if Jillian and Ryan will do any better than the rest of us. They bicker and fight. Ryan isn’t always attentive. Jillian can be demanding. If they are different from the rest of us, it is in the elemental focus they bring to the task.
They limit the conversation to what universally applies: Love, respect and trust. I don’t know if it’s because they lack the intellect to stray from the things that count, or because they don’t have the desire. It doesn’t matter. They get the big things right: Whom they love and who loves them. It really is that simple.
They’re not mean to anyone else. Why would they be mean to one another?
Wedding plans commenced immediately. Jillian and Ryan plan to be married on June 27, 2015. A grand old lodge, rustic and romantic and set in the woods not far from their apartment, will host that triumph. Jillian has already invited everyone she knows. And everyone she doesn’t. It will be a fine ceremony. Very much in keeping with their lives to this point.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to applaud all who have taken the time to see Jillian, rather than simply look at her. You have made all the difference.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Kerry Daugherty
PAUL DAUGHERTY has been a sports columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer since 1994. He has covered nearly every major American sporting event, as well as five Summer Olympic Games. He is the author of Fair Game, a collection of his sports columns, and coauthor of books with Chad Johnson and Johnny Bench. He blogs daily at The Morning Line on Cincinnati.com. He lives in Loveland, Ohio, with his wife, Kerry.
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ALSO BY PAUL DAUGHERTY
Chad: I Can’t Be Stopped
Fair Game
CREDITS
Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Front cover photograph © by Robert D. Barnes/Getty Images
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Interior photos courtesy Paul Daugherty.
COPYRIGHT
AN UNCOMPLICATED LIFE. Copyright © 2015 by Paul Daugherty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-235994-0
EPUB Edition MARCH 2015 ISBN 9780062359964
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