I met Kiki Bush on dating app about two months into the pandemic of 2020. I should have been off traveling in Italy that month, she should have been in Berlin; instead, we met in our shared childhood home-state of Kansas, and we had our first date on the rural property where I stay when I’m not traveling.
Nobody was sure at the time how Covid-19 was transmitted, so we spent the day socially distanced outside on the prairie. When it got late I didn’t want the conversation to end, so I asked her if she wanted to sleep with me — and, when she said that she did, we spent the night ten feet apart, in separate sleeping bags, on top of my deck.
The conversation that began that day is still going, and in May of 2021 we met under the cottonwoods east of my deck and exchanged wedding vows.
One of Kiki’s charms is that she has been utterly independent of social media for years. To learn more about her work as a stage and screen actress, check out her collaborations with such directors as Charlie Kaufman and Barry Levinson, or her TV appearances on shows like Law & Order: SVU, The Good Wife, and The Affair. Or listen in as she occasionally drops in on my podcast. A good place to start is my essay episode “Pandemic love, cheating death, and cassette tapes,” which (among other things) details how we met during the pandemic — as well as a less formal sequel episode, “Memories you didn’t know you remembered.”
Perhaps my favorite episode with Kiki thus far is “Long-distance hiking at home: The art of journeying out of your own back door,” which documents our 22-mile hike across the Kansas prairie to a town known as “Little Sweden.” Kiki also appears in my road-trip episode “Five Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home,” and she helped me interview author Sophfronia Scott in an episode about Thomas Merton, “What a 20th century monk can teach us about living.” No doubt you’ll hear more from Kiki as our journey together deepens and seeks out new horizons.
The decades that passed before I met Kiki feel like lucky ones: I traveled around the world several times, wrote a few books, taught at some fancy schools, made some great friends. Still, I feel like I will always measure my life in terms of before and after I met Kiki Bush. If manage to live to 100, it will be from the attempt to keep the conversation with her going.
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