Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.”—Flavia Weedn

July 5th would have been our 19th wedding anniversary, and the 18th would have been Dennis’s 62nd birthday. 💝 I’m not really planning to do anything. If I didn’t have a doctor’s appointment, I’d probably just spend the day in bed, alone with my own thoughts. Corinne and I did talk about going to see a movie, so that’s a possibility. On his birthday, we’ll finally be celebrating his life since he passed away in the middle of quarantine, and we would only have been allowed ten people at his funeral. Dennis was a force. Ten spots would not have been nearly enough. 🥰

Dennis and I met online in January of 2002. We didn’t meet in person until the end of May that year, and we got married about five weeks later. Fast? Maybe. But I have always said that all we could do was talk. He was in New York, and I was in Illinois. There was no such thing as Facetime or video chats, and this was in the days of cell calls not being free until evening. We spent a ridiculous amount of time on the phone and on Yahoo Messenger. We talked. And we talked some more. And then we talked some more. So even though we got married six months after “meeting,” we knew each other pretty well by the time we said “I do.”

What I have discovered in the 9.5 months that he’s been gone is that it probably wouldn’t have even taken six months if we had been in the same city. He drew people in because he was kind and funny and charismatic. I’m not saying he didn’t have any flaws. He absolutely did. But everything else outweighed the flaws. Dennis made an impression on people, and it didn’t take a lot of time.

One of the women I worked with, who is also a good friend, lives in California. I’ve only been in the same room with her a handful of times, and she never met Dennis in person. But we had a group text with her that we renamed Ahyees + Ashley. She and Dennis got along great because they were both talkers and extremely social. (Ironic that I’m surrounded by social butterflies, I know.) Anytime she and I spent time on the phone, she always took time to talk to “Den Den.” Yes, she had never met him, but he had a nickname courtesy of Ashley.

Another woman I worked with, also a good friend, lives in Boston. Corinna actually did meet Dennis…once, when she was in Chicago for work and we had a team dinner downtown. I had to stay in the city overnight, and Corinne was still pretty young, so he brought her downtown for dinner so she could see me. So he met the team then. Corinna was always recommending TV shows because she and I have similar tastes.

Although I never took to the Chicago Med, Chicago PD, Chicago Fire shows that she recommended, Dennis did. And he and Corinna would talk about them, through me at first and eventually through Facebook after they became Facebook friends. I remember one summer when Dennis was counting down the days on Facebook until the new season started. He wouldn’t tell any of his friends and family what he was counting down, and they kept asking. At one point, his brother texted me to ask what Dennis was talking about, and I was sworn to secrecy. But Corinna knew. He tagged her in every single post. She told me recently that one of them came up in her Facebook memories, and she felt like it was Dennis saying hello.

Another Boston work friend, who Dennis met once at the same work dinner as Corinna, was “his Cool Jules.” He always asked how Cool Jules was doing, even after she and I were on different teams and not working together. She assured him that she had never been considered cool her whole life. When he was diagnosed, she sent him a beautiful and warm blanket to help get him through chemo side effects. He called it his Cool Jules blanket. I use it now, and our puppy, who Corinne thinks is occasionally inhabited by her dad because of the way he leans against the wall like Dennis did, seems to be pretty partial to it too. 🤔

Our hairdresser owns a small shop half a block from us. Dennis tried her out one day because she was nearby, and he never went anywhere else after that. He went to see her every few months, and she always cut his hair exactly the way he liked it. When I was planning to go for a cut, he would make sure he let her know because she would go to Poland for several weeks to visit family a couple times a year. So she would tell him to let me know to get in before a certain date or as soon as she came back. When I went for a haircut in December, I let her know Dennis had passed, and she said, “God only takes the flowers. He doesn’t take the weeds, and Dennis was definitely a flower.”

Dennis had a Facebook friend in South Africa who he knew because of a cycling group. He was so happy and proud that he could call her his friend. He sent gift cards and vacation souvenirs to a woman he knew through work (he was a specialty pharmacy tech, and she worked for a lab his company coordinated with) even though they had never met.

He also stayed in touch with a woman he bought a computer monitor from. They never met in person, just e-mailed to coordinate shipping, but they connected around tech stuff. He sent her messages every year on her birthday, and they would exchange a few e-mails. She said she didn’t realize how much those e-mails were a bright spot for her until they didn’t come this year, so she was worried about how he had fared through the pandemic and reached out in April. When I responded to let her know what had happened, she said, “He was always such a kind person and I wanted to make sure you knew that he spread that kindness wide and far.”

In November of 2019, we were in the market for a new SUV. He was already on chemo by then, and it was hitting him pretty hard the day we were signing the papers. Our salesman Nick, who we had not met until that day, was empathetic and really worked hard to get us out quickly (not an easy task when you’re buying a car.)

It’s easy to say that he’s a salesman, and he wants your business. That’s true. But when I was looking to trade in Dennis’s Impala in November 2020, I texted Nick so that I could go in on a day he would be there. He asked about Dennis, so I told him we had lost him in September. He expressed as much shock and sympathy as you can over text. When we went in that weekend to buy the car, we walked outside while we waited for the porter to bring the car around, and Nick literally broke down in tears and hugged me. He apologized for breaking down but said that Dennis was just such a nice guy and he was devastated.

Dennis left a lot of footprints, and they will always be on a lot of hearts. I will hold onto that tomorrow. 🥰

Happy Anniversary, Honey. You are missed. 😘💜

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Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for To Sir, With Love by Lauren Layne

288 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Date: June 29, 2021
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Gallery Books.

Publisher’s Description

Perpetually cheerful and eager to please, Gracie Cooper strives to make the best out of every situation. So when her father dies just months after a lung cancer diagnosis, she sets aside her dreams of pursuing her passion for art to take over his Midtown Manhattan champagne shop. She soon finds out that the store’s profit margins are being squeezed perilously tight, and complicating matters further, a giant corporation headed by the impossibly handsome, but irritatingly arrogant Sebastian Andrews is proposing a buyout. But Gracie can’t bear the thought of throwing away her father’s dream like she did her own.

Overwhelmed and not wanting to admit to her friends or family that she’s having second thoughts about the shop, Gracie seeks advice and solace from someone she’s never met—the faceless “Sir”, with whom she connected on a blind dating app where matches get to know each other through messages and common interests before exchanging real names or photos.

But although Gracie finds herself slowly falling for Sir online, she has no idea she’s already met him in real life…and they can’t stand each other.

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Main Characters:

• Gracie Cooper – operator of Bubbles & More, a high-end champagne shop in Manhattan, which was a family business started by her mother and father. She co-owns the shop with her brother and sister. She is well-known by friends and family for her “Cinderella” idea of true love. She’s on a dating app where she goes by “Lady.”
• SirNYC – an unknown man who Gracie met on a dating app, where people “meet” without seeing pictures.
• Sebastian Andrews – a New York businessman who wants to buy out the lease for Bubbles & More so they can acquire the retail space.
• Rachel – Gracie’s childhood friend who also works at Bubbles.
• Caleb and Lily – Gracie’s brother and sister, who want to keep Bubbles as a family business but don’t help Gracie with any of the business operations. May – like a mother to Gracie, Caleb, and Lily; was in love with their father after their mother died when they were children, and still acts like a mother to them now that their father has died.

In her Author’s Note at the end of To Sir, With Love, Lauren Layne admits that the premise of her love story is not an original. She just spent a while figuring out how to create her own version. If you’ve seen Nora Ephron’s 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail, you’ll understand. You’ve Got Mail was an updated version of 1940’s The Shop Around the Corner, which was based on the 1937 play Parfumerie by Miklos Laszlo. The basic premise is a love (hate) story with two people who can’t stand each other in real life but fall in love as strangers. In The Shop Around the Corner (as well as the original play and a couple musicals), it was letters. Nora Ephron updated the medium to e-mails and instant messaging. In To Sir, With Love, it’s a dating app.

If you’ve read any of my reviews of love stories in the past, you will know my feeling about them. The story is the same: boy meets girl, boy and girl hate each other, boy and girl love each other, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back, and they live happily ever after. It’s a construct that works well in romantic comedy, and what makes a “new” story good and different is the execution of the story.

It’s not going to give anything away for me to tell you that SirNYC is Sebastian. We all know they’re one and the same. That’s the idea. Gracie falls in love with both of them, and while she’s torn because she thinks she has to choose between them, she’s thrilled when she discovers that Sir and Sebastian are both her Prince Charming.

There are a number of things I like about this particular version, with the main one being that Gracie is a great (dare I say, spunky) character. She loves the idea of a Cinderella story (to the point of signing her paintings with a glass slipper), she’s desperate to find her own Prince Charming, AND she’s a tough woman who isn’t going to get walked all over. She’s a smart business woman who understands her store’s niche, updates the brand to keep up with the times, AND is really only keeping the store open because it’s a family business and she doesn’t want to disappoint her siblings and her parents’ legacy even though her real passion is art.

I love the way Gracie and Sebastian developed into a couple. Sebastian is the type of character that would make my daughter say, “I don’t like him,” and my response would be, “You’re not supposed to.” Gracie doesn’t like him either. Over time, as Gracie defends her business and Sebastian continues to push to buy out the lease, we get to see Sebastian on a more personal level—the Sebastian who Gracie falls in love with.

Layne does a great job with her characters. The situations are believable, especially how Gracie really gets in her own way because she’s so focused on preserving her family’s legacy that she sees the subtle changes in Sebastian but she doesn’t let herself embrace them. I could totally see this as a movie, either on the big screen or the Hallmark channel. I would watch it either way.

The only thing that knocked this down to 4 stars for me is that we don’t get to see enough of the interactions with Sir. That’s kind of the best part of these types of stories—the development of both relationships. By the time we meet Gracie at the beginning of the book, she’s really already in love with Sir, but I would have liked to see more robust conversations between them, maybe some real-time messaging in the app.

All in all, a great new and clean romantic comedy that would make a fantastic beach read. This was my first read of Lauren Layne and likely won’t be my last. She has written a whole host of series and runs the gamut from PG- to R-rated, depending on your preference. 😉

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