Mr. Howard was a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1997 when he was drawn to Ms. Chatfield, a freshman — “this willowy, intriguing, foxy sort of girl,” he said. Another student, Samantha Seneviratne, said that Mr. Howard and his identical twin, Nathaniel, also were conspicuous on the close-knit campus. “Everyone knew them, or at least knew who they were,” Ms. Seneviratne said. “They were ‘the hot twins.’ ”

Ms. Chatfield, now 32 and a designer for Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects in Manhattan, first observed Mr. Howard in geology class, amusing peers with bad puns about schist and gneiss. “I was trying not to snort, laughing,” she said.

They didn’t speak to each other until the next year in an English class, after which each would hover, hoping for more.

Mr. Howard, now 33 and a writer for Law360, a news service in Manhattan for business lawyers, recalled being thoroughly daunted. “She was plainly intelligent, and there’s nothing foolish about her,” he said. “She was sort of at a wry remove from it all.”

Eventually, a cup of coffee with a splash of merry banter led to a kiss in someone’s dorm.

“After that we were just sort of together,” Ms. Chatfield recalled, adding that the two had shared a comfort and a natural bond that she would not realize until many years later was rare indeed. “Life was so easy,” she said.

Although their friends describe Ms. Chatfield as the more practical of the pair, it was she who was first moved to say “I love you.”

Of that time, Ms. Seneviratne recalls: “I think she let him infect her with his dreaminess. He kind of softened her up a little.”

Things moved along “splendidly,” Mr. Howard said, at least until spring 2000, when Ms. Chatfield, then a junior, left for a semester abroad in Bolivia.

Before she left, they chose to split amicably. “Life just didn’t seem that serious back then,” Ms. Chatfield said. “Both of us figured, we’re single, we’re young. He was about to graduate — the odds were against this working out.”

Still, they left the door open a crack, agreeing to tell each other about any serious new relationships.

In Bolivia, she casually dated others. Meanwhile she received several “long, rhapsodic letters” from him describing nights spent alone, drinking, missing her.

That summer, she was back in the United States, teaching field hockey at camps, when he called from Portland, Ore., where he had relocated following his graduation from Oberlin.

“He said: ‘I really want to see you. I can’t not see you,’ ” she said. “I bought a plane ticket, spent the money that I’d just earned and we had this amazing week. We had a wonderful time together. I was totally back into it again — back in love with Sam again.”

There was one problem.

Mr. Howard said he had failed to tell her that “I had shacked up with someone else for the last semester of college.” Although it was over, he said, “I never told B about it because I knew that B would be absolutely livid.”

Once she was back on campus, someone else did. “I was holding a beer can and literally crushed the beer can with a look of shock on my face,” she said.

The can wasn’t all that was crushed.

Yes, they had agreed they might see other people. But to her, that Mr. Howard had failed to tell her that he had lived with another woman was a devastating betrayal. Her mind went reeling back to the letters he had sent to Bolivia.

“I felt foolish,” she said. “The fact that he’d been seeing someone wasn’t the issue. He had waited until I had fallen back in love with him, and he had not told me.”

Mr. Howard tried to apologize for his “perfectly idiotic maneuver” and for not having “the backbone to tell her.”

No matter. It was over.

Come spring, Mr. Howard returned to campus to celebrate with other friends in Ms. Chatfield’s graduating class.

“I grudgingly said ‘Hi,’ ” she recalled. “My friends were very supportive of me, but Sam’s also a very funny and dear person, so it’s hard to hate him for a long time.”

They crossed paths from time to time, but she managed to sustain a fairly strong dislike.

Both moved on and into other serious relationships, yet he kept writing, mostly “silly ironic trivialities” he hoped would amuse her, he said. “I wasn’t holding out for another relationship, I was very distraught at the possibility of losing her entirely.”

In November 2006, Ms. Seneviratne was organizing Ms. Chatfield’s 28th birthday party at a New York bar when she received an e-mail from Mr. Howard. On a whim, she invited him.

“She was definitely annoyed,” Ms. Seneviratne said of Ms. Chatfield.

Yet when Ms. Seneviratne saw her beloved college sweethearts laughing together at the party, she knew all was forgiven.

Ms. Chatfield said she finally was able to forgive Mr. Howard, reasoning, “Ultimately, what he did wasn’t even that bad.”

They began dating again and in January 2008 moved into an apartment in Brooklyn, where they still live.

“I adore her, and it’s all very uncomplicated,” Mr. Howard said. “We never really have any disagreements. There’s not a lot of negotiations. She’s very understanding. We’re very lucky in having a partnership that doesn’t require a lot of conscious effort or maintenance.”

Ms. Chatfield, who is working on the South Bronx Greenway project for her firm, said he helps her to enjoy life and not take it too seriously.

“I think they surprise each other,” Ms. Seneviratne said. “They keep each other guessing in a most wonderful way.”

She added: “They’re not exactly alike, but they complement each other well. I’ve seen them go through sad times and happy times, and they take care of each other. They put each other first.”

The couple were wed on Aug. 7 by the Rev. Dr. Thomas F. Pike, an Episcopal priest, on Beauchamp Point in Rockport, Me., on property bought in 1895 by the bride’s great-grandfather.

About 175 guests attended the late-afternoon ceremony in a field overlooking Penobscot Bay, a southwest breeze helping push an occasional schooner or lobster boat toward Rockport Harbor. Dinner and a reception followed under a tent nearby. Keys to the Streets of Fear, a Boston band for which the bridegroom was once a bass player, rocked at the reception.

“I’m still pretty incredulous that she’s with me,” Mr. Howard said on the eve of the wedding. “If anyone’s doubting the futility of a romantic endeavor, this is a shining endorsement for perseverance and hopefulness.”

Angels in America

By FRANK RICH

Published: August 14, 2010

REPRINTS

TO appreciate how much and how unexpectedly our country can change, look no further than the life and times of Judith Dunnington Peabody, who died on July 25 at 80 in her apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Frank Rich

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The proper names in her biographical sketch suggest a stereotype from a bygone New Yorker cartoon: Miss Hewitt’s Classes, the Ethel Walker School, Bryn Mawr, the Junior League. She “was introduced to society,” as they said of debutantes back then, at the Piping Rock Club, Locust Valley, N.Y., in 1947. As the fashionable wife of Samuel P. Peabody in the decades to follow, she shared the society pages with Pat Buckley, Babe Paley and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But to quote Tracy Lord, the socialite played by Katharine Hepburn in the classic high-society movie comedy “The Philadelphia Story,” “The time to make up your mind about people is never.” In 1985, Judith Peabody, a frequent contributor to the traditional good causes favored by those of her class, did the unthinkable by volunteering to work as a hands-on caregiver to AIDS patients and their loved ones.

Those patients were then mostly gay men, and, as Guy Trebay recently wrote in The Times, they were “treated not with compassion but as bearers of plague.” There was no drug regimen to combat AIDS, and there were many panicky rumors about how its death sentence could be spread through casual contact. People of all types and political persuasions shunned dying gay men even as they treated healthy gay men and lesbians as, at best, second-class citizens. The Times did not put the mysterious disease on Page 1 until after the casualty rate exceeded 500 and didn’t start covering it in earnest until Rock Hudson died of AIDS three years after that. In 1985, the term “gay” itself was an untouchable for writers in this newspaper.

Thanks to Peabody’s prominence, her example had a discernible effect in beating back ignorance and fear in New York. But 25 years ago, few could have imagined a larger narrative that might lead to full civil rights for gay Americans. That was change almost no one believed in. Nor could many have imagined that a day would come, as it did 10 days after Peabody’s death, when a federal judge in San Francisco would rule it unconstitutional for same-sex couples to be denied the right to be lawfully wedded in sickness and in health. Yet here America is, in 2010, on the brink of seeing that issue reach the Supreme Court.

I didn’t know Peabody, but I can only imagine that her determination to make a difference was in some part influenced by her mother-in-law, Mary Peabody. The wife of an Episcopal bishop and the mother of a governor of Massachusetts, Mary Peabody spent two nights in jail, at the age of 72, after participating in sit-ins to protest racial segregation in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964. Many were baffled why a patrician grandmother of seven would travel thousands of miles to volunteer for a racial confrontation with police officers who were armed with tear gas, dogs and electric cattle prods. “I shall go wherever I am asked to participate for freedom,” she said.

The Peabody women were among the countless players in these larger civil rights dramas. They are testimony to the courage, big-heartedness and sense of fundamental fairness that can flower in our country in the most unexpected quarters even as the angrier and more malign voices dominate the debate. And sometimes over the long term — an obscenely long term in the case of black civil rights — the good guys and women can win real victories. Make no mistake about it: The Proposition 8 trial, Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision and the subsequent reaction to it (as much a non-reaction as anything else) constitute a high point in America’s history-long struggle to live up to its democratic ideals.

Much has been said about the triumph of the odd-couple legal team, the former Bush v. Gore adversaries Ted Olson and David Boies, who opposed Prop 8 in court. But of equal significance is the high-powered lawyer on the other side, Charles Cooper. He was named one of the 10 best civil litigators in Washington in the same National Law Journal list that included Olson and, in his pre-Supreme Court incarnation, John Roberts. Yet, as Judge Walker made clear in his 136-page judgment, Cooper, for all his talent and efforts, couldn’t find facts to support his argument that full civil marital rights for same-sex couples would harm the institution of marriage, children or anyone else. Cooper only managed to summon two “expert” witnesses. In the judge’s determination, one undermined his credibility by giving testimony contradicting his own opinions while the other provided “evidence” rendered worthless by its lack of scientific methodology or even fundamental peer-review vetting.

Boies and Olson produced nine expert witnesses with the relevant professional and academic expertise lacking in Cooper’s duo and compiled an encyclopedic record of empirical findings that demolished the arguments for denying gay families equal rights under the law. In the understatement of The Economist, that record “now seems a high hurdle” for the Supreme Court to overturn. That could still happen, of course, and already there are signs of a campaign from the right to besmirch the likely swing justice, Anthony Kennedy. Though Kennedy was a Ronald Reagan appointee who wrote much of the unsigned decision in Bush v. Gore, that did not prevent him from being called “the most dangerous man in America” by the family-values czar James Dobson after Kennedy wrote a majority opinion decriminalizing gay sex in 2003.

There has already been an attempt to discredit Walker, who has never publicly discussed his sexual orientation but has been widely reported to be gay. The notion that a judge’s sexuality, gay or not, might disqualify him from ruling on marriage is as absurd as saying Clarence Thomas can’t rule on cases involving African-Americans. By this standard, the only qualified judge to rule on marital rights would be a eunuch. No less ridiculous has been the attempt to dismiss Walker as a liberal “activist judge.” Walker was another Reagan nominee to the federal bench, recommended by his attorney general, Edwin Meese (an opponent of same-sex marriage and, now, of Walker), in a December 1987 memo residing at the Reagan library. It took nearly two years and a renomination by the first President George Bush for Walker to gain Senate approval over opposition from Teddy Kennedy, the N.A.A.C.P., La Raza, the National Organization for Women and the many gay groups who deemed his record in private practice too conservative.

The attacks on Walker have fizzled fast. With rare exceptions from the hysterical fringe — Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — most political leaders have either remained silentabout the Prop 8 decision (the Republican National Committee) or punted (the Obama White House). Over at Fox News, Ted Olson silenced the states’-rights argument in favor of Prop 8 last weekend by asking Chris Wallace: “Would you like Fox’s right to a free press put up to a vote and say, well, if five states have approved it, let’s wait till the other 45 states do?” (No answer was forthcoming.)

Most of those who do argue for denying marriage equality to gay couples are now careful to say that they really, really like gay people. This, like the states’-rights argument, is a replay of the battle over black civil rights. Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of Reconstruction, recalled last week via e-mail how Strom Thurmond would argue in the early 1960s “that segregation benefited blacks and whites and had nothing to do with racism” — as if inequality were O.K. as long as segregationists pushing separate-but-equal “compromises” claimed their motives were pure.

Still another recurrent argument from the Thurmond era has it that no judge should overrule the voters, who voted 52 to 48 percent in California for Prop 8 in 2008. But as Olson also told Chris Wallace, “We do not put the Bill of Rights to a vote.” It’s far from certain in any event that a majority of California voters approve of Prop 8 now. A Field poll released two weeks before Walker’s ruling found that Californians approved of same-sex marital rights by 51 to 42 percent. Last week a CNN survey for the first time found that a majority of Americans (52 percent) believed “gays and lesbians should have a constitutional right to get married.”

None of this means that full equality for gay Americans is a done deal. Even if it were, that would be scant consolation to the latest minority groups to enter the pantheon of American scapegoats, Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. We are still a young, imperfect, unfinished country. As a young black man working as a nurse in a 1980s AIDS clinic memorably says in Tony Kushner’s epic drama “Angels in America”: “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.”

But sometimes we do hit that note, however tentatively. How one wishes that the many gay Americans who were left to die in the shadows during that horrific time — and, in most cases, without a Judith Peabody, let alone a legal spouse, by their side — could hear Judge Walker’s clarion call.

Thomas L. Friedman is off today.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 15, 2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

13-year-old survivor of plane crash released from Alaska hospital

By the CNN Wire Staff

August 16, 2010 -- Updated 0135 GMT (0935 HKT)

The family of Willy Phillips Jr. has provided this photo taken of the teenager while he was still hospitalized.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Willy Phillips Jr. was among four survivors of the crash
Former Sen. Ted Stevens died in the crash
Phillips' father was among those killed
The investigation into the cause of the Monday crash continues

RELATED TOPICS

(CNN) -- The youngest survivor of a plane crash that killed former Sen. Ted Stevens last week has been released from a hospital in Alaska, according to his family.

Willy Phillips Jr., 13, was released from Children's Hospital at Providence Alaska Medical Center and is traveling back to his home state of Maryland, his mother said in a statement Saturday.

Willy's father, former Stevens staffer Bill Phillips, was among the five people killed in the crash Monday night near Dillingham, Alaska.

In the statement, Janet Phillips thanked first-responders and other medical personnel "for their heroic efforts the night they spent on the mountain with Willy. Thank you for bringing Willy back."

Phillips also extended her condolences to the other families who lost loved ones in the wreck.

"Bill and our boys shared many Alaska memories," Phillips said in the statement. "They loved Alaska, and as we leave we know Alaska will remain imprinted on our hearts."

In addition to Willy, the survivors of the crash are former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe and his 19-year-old son, Kevin, and Jim Moorhard of Alexandria, Virginia.

Killed in the crash were Bill Phillips Sr., Stevens, 86; pilot Terry Smith, 62, of Eagle River, Alaska; Dana Tindall, 48, of Anchorage, Alaska; and Corey Tindall, 16, of Anchorage, Alaska.

A memorial service for the elder Phillips will be held Friday in Potomac, Maryland, according to the statement.

Meanwhile, federal investigators continue to probe what caused the plane to crash into a rugged mountainside in southwestern Alaska, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Alaska Air National Guard rescuers were hampered by poor weather and terrain -- slogging for hours through rain, fog and wind to reach the site of the plane crash.

Autopsies on the five victims found the deaths were the result of blunt force trauma, Greg Wilkinson, an official at the medical examiner's office, said Friday. He said the state medical examiner, Dr. Katherine Raven, found the injuries to be consistent with this type of crash.

Raven also found that the injuries were not survivable, he said.

A funeral for Stevens, who served in the U.S. Senate for 40 years, will be held Wednesday at the Anchorage Baptist Temple in Anchorage.

Japanese economy slows unexpectedly

By Lindsay Whipp, FT.com

August 16, 2010 -- Updated 0347 GMT (1147 HKT)

Japan's growth slows

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Figures appear meager against those posted by the world's other giant economies
Germany generates robust 9.1. percent, its fastest pace since reunification
China may have overtaken Japan to become the world's largest economy
Slower exports will add to concerns global recovery is weakening

Tokyo, Japan (FT.com) -- The strength of Japan's economic recovery came under question on Monday as second-quarter growth figures came in sharply below economists' expectations.

Growth in the country's gross domestic product slowed to an annualized, seasonally adjusted pace of 0.4 per cent in the three months ended June 30. That was far below the revised 4.4 per cent pace posted in the first quarter and economists' predictions of 2.3 per cent for the latest period.

The figures also appear meager against those posted for the quarter by the world's other giant economies. The US reported annualized growth of 2.4 per cent while Germany generated a robust 9.1 per cent, its fastest pace since reunification, on the back of surging exports amid a weaker euro. China may have overtaken Japan to become the world's largest economy after posting year-on-year growth of 10.3 per cent in the quarter. Beijing published revised data on Monday raising its GDP for the first quarter.

The sharp deceleration of the Japanese economy was due to slower net export growth and weaker personal and residential consumption. Private inventories were also a drag, though this could mean that companies are rebuilding stockpiles after having wound them down in the second quarter.

With Japan reliant on trade for growth, slower exports will add to concerns that the global recovery is weakening at a time when the effects of domestic fiscal stimulus are waning. Economists are likely to trim their Japanese GDP growth estimates for the year.

Slower export growth is a challenge for Japanese companies at a time when the yen is trading close to a 15-year high against the dollar as risk averse investors pile into the currency. Although authorities have stepped up verbal intervention, analysts are skeptical that direct intervention from the Ministry of Finance is likely.

Monday's GDP figures could add to pressure on policymakers to find other ways to deal with slowing growth and the impact of the stronger yen on the recovery.

Last week the central bank kept its economic assessment unchanged and did not announce any further easing measures.

"The appreciation of the yen [is one of the biggest risks] which could damp yen-denominated profits of exports, which then may have negative repercussions on domestic capital spending," said Kyohei Morita, Japan economist at Barclays Capital.

Naoki Iizuka, an economist at Mizuho, predicted that if the yen rose to about Y80 and stayed there, companies would focus their capital spending overseas.

On a price-adjusted basis, effective exchange rates are slightly below the average of the past 30 years, suggesting there is still room for the currency to rise further without direct government intervention.

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Monday, August 16, 2010

B Chatfield and Samuel Howard

By CHRISTINA SOBRAN

Published: August 13, 2010

Brooke Holland for The New York Times