(C) Common Dreams
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Frida Berrigan and Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer: Vows [1]

['Lois Smith Brady']

Date: 2011-07-17

He described their chemistry as “off the charts.”

On their next few dates, they took long walks around New York. She was always amazed by the quirky things he pointed out. He brought her to a cemetery on the Lower East Side, for instance, just to show her the peculiar name — Preserved Fish — of a person buried there.

“I wanted to dig into this new life I’d planned for myself at the Catholic Worker,” Ms. Berrigan said. “But from the beginning, Patrick was just so solid and forthright and honest and a lot of fun. Those qualities just overwhelmed me.”

Occasionally, Rosena joined them on their outings. “Falling in love with Patrick also meant falling in love with Rosena, and falling in love with a family,” Ms. Berrigan said. “That was really easy.”

Still, their courtship was slow and old-fashioned in many ways. They saw each other only on weekends. He wasn’t allowed in her room at the Catholic Worker. They rarely talked on the phone. They communicated via handwritten letters and packages.

“Every week, I’d get a very tiny envelope in the mail, an old love card,” she said. “He probably got them at a flea market.” She added: “One time, he sent me a bag of couscous. It was from Turkey, and it was called Frida couscous. I just got this sense, ‘Wow, he’s out there in the world thinking about me.’ “

Soon, they wanted to spend all of their time together.

“From very early on,” she said, “I would look at him and think: This is someone I want a family with. This is a person I want to grow old with. This is the person I want to struggle with.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/fashion/weddings/frida-berrigan-and-patrick-sheehan-gaumer-vows.html

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