When people ask why I moved here, I usually tell them it's because the zip code is a palindrome. Remember those little phrases that read the same forward and backward? Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was I, ere I saw Elba, which is about Napoleon. But the real reason was to marry Tad.

When I first met Tad, at a writer's conference, he looked as though he'd been living on the street for 200 years. And he has a very deep voice, which magnified the untamed aspect. But behind the scraggly teeth and wild eyebrows he turned out to be a pussycat. And he had something I needed in a man more than anything else right then: kindness.

He also had a brain injury, which appealed to my over-developed instinct to rescue other people instead of myself. He got this injury falling off a bridge onto his head, in 1978. A lot of what he talked about at first was from that era: in two minutes he could work Keith Richards' name into any conversation, whether it made sense to the rest of us or not.

I was carrying a lot of pain from recently unearthed childhood wounds, and I felt a great kinship with his losses. Also, he's really smart, which I love. The brain injury rerouted his thinking down some strange back alleys, but it didn't erase his essential intelligence. He retains a lot of information from before 1978 — so if you ever need to know the kings of France in chronological order or when the Stratocaster was invented, give him a call. But more recent things are up for grabs. He has a one-in-365 chance of remembering my birthday, and regularly asks where we're going when we're half-way there in the car.

When I asked his permission to read this essay, he said what he always says when I write about him: "Molly, it's really not about me, it's about you."

I adore Tad, but I didn't marry him. We've turned into best friends instead. He helps me stack firewood, I help him open a new page on his computer. He's a wonderful friend for a writer because his brain doesn't remember clichés, so he's always saying something surprising. Once at a party he turned to me and asked, "What is the name for those little reserve farms of religion up and down the coast? The ones with the bells." It took me a minute, but I got there. "You mean the California Missions?" "That's right."

The particular way Tad's brain got mushed has made him nearly always cheerful. He lives in a limited range of emotion, just on the plus side of center. That's mostly wonderful, although sometimes his equanimity only increased the strain I felt, trying to take care of both of us.

Sometimes, when I'm alone in my house, nearly nauseous at the idea of still being single at 50, I think of some goofy thing he's said, and I have to laugh. Thank God one of us is living happily ever after.