In the late 1960s, my sister Mary Alice was dating a young man named Mike Morgan, the drummer in a very popular Detroit-area band called The Underdogs. For a short time, they were even engaged. I was too young to understand the full drama of what was taking place, but I remember the feeling of it. I remember the intensity. I remember one night in particular when Mike stormed out of our house on Windmill Pointe in Grosse Pointe Park and tore away in his father’s green Cadillac Eldorado—tires squealing and its body fish tailing as he disappeared down the street never to return.

Whatever happened between them, it was over.

The particulars were none of my business then, and remain mostly unknown to me now. But the image stayed with me: the mansion, the anger, my sister, the drummer from The Underdogs, and the green Eldorado vanishing into the night.

A few years later, Mary Alice met Jim Fox, a Chicago Bull, at the Chicago Auto Show. Within months they were married, and Mike Morgan became one of those names that drifted into the family archive—part memory, part mystery, part teenage legend.

Then, about thirty years later, another Morgan appeared.

In December of 1999, I was introduced to Marcie Powers by, of all people, a woman named Morgan Morgan (her real name), Mike Morgan’s sister. The Mike Morgan that was at one time engaged to my sister.

Years before that, I had met Morgan at a party in a 4th floor loft on Bryant Street in San Francisco—a stone’s throw from the Embarcadero held by another fellow Grosse Pointe transplant, John Present. Morgan and I became good friends. She was smart, attractive, charismatic, and connected in a San Francisco way where one party leads to another person, and another person leads to a chapter you never saw coming. Little did I know one of those chapters was coming my way.

That December, Morgan invited me to her company Christmas party at the Thomas Fogarty Winery in Woodside, tucked into the redwoods and foothills west of Silicon Valley. She told me she was bringing a girlfriend named Marcie Powers and that the three of us would go together in a Lincoln Town Car. I said “I’m in.”

The driver picked Morgan up first, then Marcie a few blocks away on Washington Street in Pacific Heights, and finally me in North Beach. There we were, stopped in my little North Beach alley street, with a bottle of champagne popped open and me climbing into the back seat with my guitar—which Marcie, before I had even met her properly, had insisted I bring. I had been sitting on my stoop playing as the Town car drove up.

That alone should have told me something.

From the moment Marcie and I met, there were vibes of possibility. Immediate. The kind of good vibes you do not analyze in the moment because you are too busy feeling them.

At the event, we danced the night away, all the while maintaining steady eye contact. The main reason for that eye contact initially was that a French friend of mine, David, that I occasionally would go with and others to the Saloon on Grant Avenue in North Beach for live blues and dancing, once said that maintaining eye contact with your dance partner ensures uninterrupted flow—no stepping on each others feet, no missed twirls, no loss of balance—a form of telepathy. I imparted that wisdom to Marcie from the get-go and before long that eye contact took on more than mechanics. Whatever was happening between us was happening quickly, silently, unmistakably. There was music, wine, laughter, camraderie, celebration and the soft glamour of a company Christmas party in the hills above the Bay Area and my new found love interest.

After the Fogarty party, the driver took the three of us back to San Francisco to another Christmas party, this one hosted by a friend of Marcie and Morgan’s, Cheryl Lucanegro. Marcie, Morgan and Cheryl were part of what I called The Gang of Eight—eight women—business up and comers in the world of Bay Area tech and all of them were there that night. The evening continued, the city atmosphere replacing the vineyard hills, the libations and conversation carrying us from one room to another, one vignette to the next.

At the end of the night, we all went home. But before we parted, Marcie invited me to her own holiday party the next evening.

It was Marcie’s annual Christmas party, well attended by her friends and newcomers as well, including me. I arrived still trying to understand what had happened the night before, and then I saw her in her element.

She moved through the room with warmth and charm, making sure everyone had a drink, everyone knew where the food was, introducing friends to other friends and making sure everyone felt included. She was gracious and attentive and had that rare gift of making a room feel better simply by moving through it. I was spellbound. It was reminiscient of my own mother who was a great party host.

And as I watched her that night, I said to myself:

That beautiful soul is going to be my wife someday.

Not “I would like to marry that woman someday.” Not “Wouldn’t it be something if this went somewhere.” It came to me with a strange and quiet certainty.

That woman is going to be my wife.

A little more than three and a half years later, in July of 2003, Marcie and I exchanged vows in St. Helena, witnessed by 120 friends and family members in California’s wine country, at a seven-acre bed and breakfast with three rose filled terraced levels overlooking Anderson’s Conn Valley Vineyards.

Of course, the truly bizarre version of the story would have been if Morgan Morgan and I had gotten married. 

That would have been the full cosmic pretzel.

But life, being a better writer than I am, chose something subtler. Morgan was not the destination. She was the messenger.

Thirty years earlier, a Morgan had stormed away from my family in a green Eldorado.

Thirty years later, a Morgan delivered me to the woman I would marry in a Lincoln Town Car.

And in some strange, sweet, circular way, it felt as though Marcie and I had finished what my sister Mary Alice and Morgan’s brother Mike could not.

If that is not a version of six degrees of separation, I don’t know what is.