Authors: Paul Daugherty

An Uncomplicated Life (39 page)

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

Interior photos courtesy Paul Daugherty.

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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