Birmingham: A Love Unique

I met my wife in Birmingham. She is all and everything else is small, and I can’t help but adore Birmingham, if only because I met her there, on a cold, wintery night. I had moved to Birmingham because I was offered a copy-writing/editing position at a firm there. The firm had promised me a lucrative career with fringe benefits and a lot of room to grow, expand, and many opportunities to climb the proverbial corporate ladder. My job, as it turned out, was short-lived, but my life with my wife, Sarah, whom I met in dear Birmingham, has been glorious, not without pitfalls, but glorious altogether. She illuminates every day I have on this earth, and I am, and not afraid to confess, madly in love with her.

We both, by some enigmatic twist of fate, ended up at the same hotel together: the Hilton Birmingham metropole. It was one of those rare gifts of serendipity that float into our laps sometime, anomalously, in this life of ours. She had just arrived in Birmingham from Oxford, where she was finishing up her last year doing her Phd at the university there, to visit a family friend, and she got into town late, and decided, last-minute (oh how the fates impinge on us!), to book a room at the Birmingham Hilton on a whim. She was tired, exhausted from her work at the university. I guess she thought a few days in a ritzy hotel would do her some good, restore her faculties some and refresh her. Thank heavens for her exhaustion; otherwise I would not have met my dear, my darling, and my life!

Birmingham, I owe you everything, somehow. It’s amazing how an array of contingencies and variables catapult our lives into something, either good or bad. Fortuity has a way of saving some of us, and it did so with me! I remember studying Greek Mythology in college, as an elective, and I can recall a line by a pre-Socratic philosopher by the name of Heraclitus that was expressed something like this: you can never step in the same river twice. He also said: the way up and the way down are the same. Ultimately, what I gleaned from this was that change was all and everything is small, and he was right. If it wasn’t for that one constant, the perpetuity of change, I wouldn’t have met my wife in that lovely hotel.