The doctor unlocks the door to his new apartment. He’s just getting a divorce. He has bought nothing for his new place except a stereo system. Hearing music from inside, the doctor stops. Whoever set it up must have left the stereo on — and it’s tuned to … what? A Country Western station! That’s for blue-collar people, not me, thinks the doctor. But before he can cross the room, the woeful song penetrates his being. The doctor sinks to the carpet and bursts into tears. “They’re singing about my life,” he sobs.

Vernon Lee had walked a narrow and circumspect path. His Chinese parents drummed solemn values of honesty and success into him and his four siblings as they grew up in Honolulu. All five were encouraged to “marry white” — in that time and place, it was one more way to get ahead. So when the pretty Caucasian woman he’d been dating for eight months issued an ultimatum — marriage, if he was “really serious” — Vernon complied.
    “I got to Denver when I was twenty-seven. By the time I opened my practice I was thirty. Getting married was the next thing to do, I figured,” he says.
    But Vernon hadn’t figured in such matters as compatibility.
    “People used to tell us, ‘You two are the most different people I know!’ And it was true! How we felt about fun, our ideas about affection, everything was so different…
    “The day after I got married, I knew it was a mistake. The day after! But I wasn’t going to bail out. All I could think was, I took a vow to spend my life with you and I will.”
    Eighteen years passed. Vernon got used to feeling lonely. He got used to his wife’s criticisms. She was right; he didn’t know what to say at parties, or how to dress. Vernon concentrated on building up his practice. His patients, at least, seemed to like him. Then one day one of them said, “Hey, I saw your wife at the attorney’s today.”
    “Honey, were you at our attorney’s today?” Vernon asked that night. Minutes later he learned that his wife had been seeing another man and she wanted a divorce.
    “And just like that, it was over.”

Vernon’s eyes are wide with remembered shock. “I’d been a good boy. God was going to take me straight to Heaven. Now everything was turned upside down…”
The pain was so bad that Vernon began seeing a therapist. And every night, he would listen to KYGO, Denver’s country station. It was the only thing that made any sense.
    “Every song was cheating, hurting, longing — what my life had become. I went out and bought a hundred country CDs that first year. One song I played over and over, Travis Tritt singing “For You.” He’s saying he didn’t cry anymore because he’d found someone to love. I would listen to that track in my car and cry.”    
    Then Vernon found out he could hear this music live, at a place called The Grizzly Rose. He smiles, now, at the memory.
    “I bought cowboy boots and the right kind of jeans. I went in and sat down. A song comes on. Everyone in the place jumps on the dance floor. They all move one way — then the other — all together. Afterwards I tapped a woman on the shoulder and asked, ‘Ma’am, what was that?’ ‘That was the Electric Slide,’ she said. ‘How do you do it?’ ‘You take a lesson!’”
    So Vernon took dance lessons. He also took up golf, and painting and photography. He excelled at everything he tried; this was familiar. But it was no longer enough.
    “When I first started, I took photographs of things other people would think were beautiful. Then I told myself, take pictures of what you think is beautiful! That felt so different!”
    Instead of fulfilling others’ expectations, he was starting to feel, and fulfill, his own. Vernon donated his entire wardrobe (clothes his wife had selected) to charity and shopped for clothes that he liked. “Who cares if you wear a purple shirt with a brown tie, as long as you are happy,” said his therapist.

Vernon was getting happier. But socializing still made him uncomfortable. “I didn’t have anything to say,” Vernon recalls. “When guys asked, ‘Hey did you see what Michael Jordan did last night?’ I would think, Who is Michael Jordan? So my therapist told me, ‘I want you to learn a little bit of everything.’”
    Vernon loved this assignment. He started reading the newspaper, followed by Time magazine and Sports Illustrated. “I sat there at night and learned who were the best starts, the final sixteen, the hockey whatever …
    “My wife used to tell me I was boring,” Vernon says quietly. “She was right. Now I was learning to be interesting. I was learning something else too: that I had never really loved her.”
    The thought of making such a huge mistake again horrified him. Vernon imagined he’d stay single forever.

All through Vernon’s tale, Judy has been at his side. A light hand on his arm when he described his divorce. Appreciative chuckling when he re-enacted the Electric Slide scene. Now she tells her story.
    Judy’s parents emigrated from Japan and ended up in Colorado. Her older sisters — all in traditional arranged marriages — felt that Judy, the youngest of twelve, was spoiled because she was allowed to date, like American girls. But Judy, too, had to marry Japanese. At 22, she and Donald tied the knot. But twenty-eight contented years later, Donald was diagnosed with cancer and died less than a year later.
    “I was a widow so young,” Judy says softly. “I was so alone. “
    Her husband hadn’t wanted that for her.
    “Right before he died, my husband told me his wish, that I would marry again,” Judy says. Her serene composure breaks as she reaches for a tissue. “It was a beautiful thing to do. But deep down, I didn’t believe it.”

After a few hard years, Judy joined a golf group. Then she took line dancing lessons; soon, she was teaching classes herself at nine different centers. She had loved dancing as a girl. Now life seemed good again, even if she was alone.
    “I never dreamt I’d have a man in my later years. And then one day in 2005, a lady in my dance class said that she knew a man, a doctor — in fact, her daughter was his office manager. He was a golfer and a dancer, my two loves!”

That was the first time Judy heard of Vernon. But he’d learned of her three years before. Back then, Vernon’s office manager and her mother had already agreed: Judy and Vernon would be perfect for each other.
    “Tell them why you didn’t want to meet me, honey,” Judy says in her soft, bemused voice.
    “I’d never dated an Asian woman in my life,” Vernon admits. “Until Judy, I was like a banana, yellow on the outside but white on the inside.”
    It wasn’t until 2005, when Vernon spent the July 4th weekend with his office manager and her family, that he gave in.
    “They sat me down and grilled me,” Vernon recalls. “‘Where was my life going? Who was I dating? What were my goals?’ Then they said, ‘Listen. This lady we told you about, she is just like you.’”
    Those words made an impression. Vernon now knew who he was. Shortly thereafter, when he was 59 and Judy was 64, he took her out for dinner.
    “I saw right away that Judy was the kindest woman I had ever met,” Vernon says.
Judy smiles, “As soon as we started talking and laughing, I realized how lonely I had been for someone exactly like Vern. And two months later I was in his house!”
    “What happened was, some of my family showed up,” Vernon explains. “So I said, ‘Judy, why don’t you come here and bring enough stuff for five days, so we can just do things?’ After five days, I said, ‘Judy, we are having too much fun. You can’t go home!’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to go home.’”

“We are so the same,” Judy says now. “Donald and I weren’t this much alike. His dearest friends are my dearest friends. Vern and I golf every chance we get. We love to dance together. Look, here are our certificates! We won first prize two years in a row for waltzing at the Senior Olympics.”
    This lady we told you about, she is just like you…
    “We like the same kind of fun, the same kind of affection,” Vernon says. “Judy and I both like to be held at night. She is such a gentle person. I am too. I love to bring her coffee in the morning…”
    “Vern rubs my feet! He does everything for me.”
    “It is easy because there is so much love. We tell each other thirty times a day, ‘I love you.’”
    “In the middle of the night, I can hear him say ‘I love you,’” Judy teases. “He must say it while he’s sleeping. ”

You’ve shown me love I never knew / And there is nothing I won’t do for you.
— Travis Tritt and Bruce Ray Brown, “For You”*

*Post Oak Publishing; Brass Crab Publishing.