Camel from Kyzylkum

Sparky

IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, I was pretty much settled in my cozy apartment in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I loved living there. It had been one year since I had started to work at Emmes. I was busy at work but when I returned home after work, I felt lonely. I wanted to have someone special in my life, someone to love who would love me back, someone with whom I could share my life. One evening I was browsing the Internet, and I stumbled across a dating website. A very sincere ad caught my attention, and I replied to it. For one week it was back-and-forth email communication before we finally met face-to-face at the “Hamburger Hamlet” restaurant at Rio Center in Maryland on July 17, 1999. Sparky came with flowers, and it melted my heart. Since that day, we have never been apart.

When Sparky published his ad on the dating website, he had been a widower for three years. His wife of twenty years, Liz, had passed away from breast cancer. He had three sons: Andrew (from a first marriage), Matt, and Dan.

Sparky’s official name is Emerson C. Norton, Jr. The nickname “Sparky” he got before he was born in 1949. His father was around fifty years old when his mother, thirty-five years old, became pregnant with their first child. Their friends started making jokes, telling his father, “Oh, you still have sparks in your blood!” When the baby was born, everyone in the family called him “Sparky”. Six years later, Sparky’s sister, Luciel, was born, but she had no nickname. Sparky’s father, Emerson Norton, competed in the decathlon for the United States in the 1924 Summer Olympics, held in Paris, France. He won the silver medal. He is listed under “Emerson Norton” on Wikipedia.

Sparky lived in a house in Fairfax County, Virginia. It was a three-level house with a back patio and a big back yard. His youngest son, Dan, lived with Sparky at that time. When Sparky brought me for the first time to his house, I saw a not cozy and not well-kept house of a lonely man. Sparky said, “I know some things need to be done in the house, but I was not sure what to do.” I always liked to make my home a cozy place, even when I lived in a tent in the geological expedition. Cozy means a lot of things—something that is comfy, lived in, warm, relaxing, happy, has good vibes, and is a place where one wants to hang out and relax. I wanted this house to be such a place.

So, a few days later, I asked Sparky, “Do you really want to do some improvements in your house?” When he said yes, the next week I arranged to meet with a Russian guy, Eugine, who had a business of remodeling houses. Eugine had been an architect in St. Petersburg in Russia before he immigrated to the United States. He came to the house to see it and make estimates for the project. Before long, Eugine and his team began remodeling Sparky’s entire house; the project took seven months.