I thought this was a sweet story for Sunday blogging. Yay, biracial couple!
Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesBy KATIE ZEZIMA
VowsSOMETIMES the one for whom you’ve been searching your entire life turns out to have been beside you all along or, in the case of Leah Elizabeth Squires and Eric Raymond Traub, in the next crib.
“The memories of her go as far back as I can remember,” Mr. Traub, now 32, said.
In the 1970s, their parents, Helen Gagel and Bob Squires and Linda and Ray Traub, were neighbors in Evanston, Ill., and became close friends, sharing a bond that ran deeper than their camaraderie and commitment to social justice. Ms. Squires’s parents are an interracial couple, while Mr. Traub, of mixed race himself, is an adopted son of white parents. Back then, Linda Traub said, “It wasn’t as accepted.”
Leah Squires and Eric Traub, the most bookish of the children, could always be found, said Catherine Squires, an older sister, “with their heads together” reading mystery and fantasy books. So independent and feisty was Ms. Squires that she even got Mr. Traub to play with her Barbies, her mother said.
After leaving for college they stayed in touch, if only sporadically, leading lives that were quite different yet oddly in sync.
In the winter of 2002, when the Varoom Group, a collective of dancers and choreographers of which Ms. Squires was a member, gave a performance, Mr. Traub and his girlfriend at the time came to New York to see it.
Their next reunion — the funeral of Ms. Squires’s father in October 2004 — was sad, but far more telling about their relationship. Mr. Traub was a pallbearer, which served to remind Ms. Squires of just how deep the bond between the two families remained.
“My dad was one of his first role models of being an African-American man,” she said.
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