A Bench in London

Paris was Marylin Bender’s town. Her husband’s was London. When he died nine years ago, Bender began visiting some of his favorite places. At London’s Berkeley Square, she noticed that plaques adorned the benches. Bender decided to try to secure one in her husband’s memory, resulting in an unexpected journey of errors, persistence, sweetness and heartbreak. “As a teenager, after my family had moved to Manhattan, I had a few park bench trysts with impoverished students in Central Park,” Bender writes in a New York Times essay. “None ended happily until, years later, a man I had met a few months before proposed that I accompany him on a business trip to Europe and Asia as his wife. I accepted instantly, we married, and thereafter we snuggled on benches in the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, in the Tuileries in Paris, along the Hofvijver in The Hague and regularly in Berkeley Square.”

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