When the clock radio went off before six am (poor dude had to get up extra early) it was the beginning of a radio lab story – a story about Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan and the day she fell in love with him. Naturally, we stayed beneath the blankets, snuggled against each other to listen because both of us share a deep love of Sagan.

When I was a kid, there was a show on television called Cosmos. Cosmos was created and hosted by Carl Sagan (and Ann Druyan along with Stephen Soter). Sagan was an astrophysicist and an author and it was a look into well, essentially everything – stars, planets, black holes, the earth – everything. And he presented this information, which until then had been heady and out of reach of most people, and made it not only understandable, but fascinating.

Anyway, before Cosmos, NASA asked him to work on a project to be included in two Voyager spacecraft that were set for deep space – essentially, these craft were going to be flung outward into the universe in hopes that sometime in the future, another race would find them and use the gold records Sagan had created to understand what humanity was.

Imagine that job! So Ann was part of the project with him as they pulled together the sounds of whale song, of music across cultures, of a mother’s first words to a child after birth, essentially everything they could think up that was in fact, sewn into our consciousness as humans.

Ann and Carl had been friends and co-workers until one phone call where Carl made a move, a silly, sweet offhand comment, and Ann caught it and ran. They married two days after the launch and were together until he died in 1997.

Hearing Ann tell the story of the project, of Carl’s love for it and of her love for him left me deeply moved. It’s a simple story at its heart (even with spacecraft) about two people finding each other after they were with each other all along. It’s why I write romance. It’s why I love my husband – and it was the best Valentine’s radio story I’ve ever heard

This is the link and I encourage you all to listen to her tell the story (though I encourage you to have tissues handy because by the end, I was fully crying)