As he grows up, Ed Greco's two great loves -- his high school sweetheart, and physics -- come into conflict.

For the last ten years, Ed Greco has taught physics at Georgia Tech where he has been active in the development of new curriculum for undergraduate students. A native Floridian, he moved to Atlanta in 2000 with his high school sweetheart to attend graduate school. When not in the classroom, he coordinates the outreach activities for the school of physics and serves as radio show co-host “Fat Daddy Sorghum” on WREK’s Inside the Black Box where he enjoys sharing his passion for science with the Atlanta community. Photography, Conchology, foraging for wild edibles, and exploring Appalachia on a motorcycle are just a few of his varied pastimes. Mostly, however, he enjoys spending quality times with his loving family.

This story originally aired on July 5, 2019 in an episode titled “Marriage.”

Story Transcript

I fell in love with Physics when I was in the eighth grade.  My family had moved around a lot the past couple of years and I found myself alone at a school where I didn’t know anyone and so I spent my lunches outside in the empty courtyard building paper airplanes.  I developed an obsession with these airplanes and how the tiny differences in the folds, in the wrinkles, the tuck of a flap could cause a completely different trajectory of that airplane through the air. 

I started to obsess about it.  I visited libraries, I looked for books and unfolded every airplane that I could come across and I just couldn’t make sense of it. I was flummoxed.  So my mom did the only thing that you can do with a weird little kid obsessed with airplanes. She enrolled me in a science and engineering program at the high school across town. 

On that first day of ninth grade, I sat in the back of an old yellow bus, about an hour before sunrise, and I saw Elizabeth. She had gotten on the bus and I remember looking at her.  I wish I could tell you that it was love at first sight but, really, I just thought she was cute and I was happy that there was at least one girl on the bus that day. 

For the whole next year we spent bus rides together and I learned that she was intelligent and passionate about science, like I was.  She wanted to grow up to be a physician so I would check out these old, dirty philosophy books from the library to try to impress her.  Every day, I would inch a few seats closer to where she was sitting with her friends and then I would wait and I would interject myself into their conversation and I would start an argument.  You see, she's very confident and she was one of the top students in our school.  So she was confident in her beliefs, in her opinions and so I would take the opposite side.  I would be fluid and ambiguous and basically my goal was just to infuriate her. 

But it worked.  So by tenth grade we were one of those couples that you see walking around everywhere holding hands and having lunch and hanging out by the locker.  That Thanksgiving at her aunt’s lake house, she introduced me to her family and there, holding hands, we said ‘I love you’ for the first time.  I remember that feeling because I was filled with just this warmth and this light and, for the first time in my life, I felt a completeness that I had never felt. 

After that, high school was a breeze.  We sailed right through it.  By our senior year, we had decided that we wanted to continue dating and we would apply to the same schools.  So we visited little arts colleges all around the southeast and I fell in love with the program out of state and she got an incredibly generous scholarship offer in Florida. 

I had to decide for the first time that senior year if I would choose my love for Physics and my love for Elizabeth and the tension started to build in our relationship and I got scared.  I decided that I would go to the school in Florida with her.  I knew that I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up and I knew, for Physics, that meant a PhD. 

So I rationalized it.  I said I'll work hard.  I'll get into a good graduate school.  That’s what’s really going to matter, so we started our freshman year of college together.  But I carried with me some resentment and bitterness so we had a very rough first couple of years of college. 

Somehow, we hung on I think because we both just worked so hard.  She was a Chemistry and a Biology major and I was a Physics and a Math major.  We had jobs after school and so we just buckled down. 

The summer before our senior year, we were at the beach and it was sunset and I proposed to her.  She said yes.  Again, I was flooded with that feeling of light and warmth and completeness and so we started our senior year together with plans to get married right after graduation.  She wanted to be a physician, which meant that she needed to go to medical school, and I was now dead set on a PhD program in Physics.  We looked for cities all across the southeast that had good programs in both. 

That spring, I got my acceptance to Georgia Tech into their PhD program but Elizabeth got waitlisted at Emory Medical School and she was crushed.  It was the first time that she had not succeeded at something academically.

But we got married, we went on our honeymoon and, after our honeymoon, we sat down and we came up with a plan.  The plan was that we were going to move to Atlanta where I would start my PhD.  She would get a job and maybe in a year she would apply again for medical school. 

Honestly, that time, I was kind of blind to the pain that she was dealing with.  I was excited and just filled with the expectation of what it would be like to finally be on a PhD program and she just was kind of tuning out.  So when the first wrinkle in our plan came, which was Georgia Tech sending me a letter to say that the married graduate housing was full and we would need to find a place to live all on our own, she didn’t want to join me on the trip to Atlanta to look for an apartment. 

It didn’t matter.  Fine.  I can do that.  I’m an adult now.  We’re going to start this new life in a city far from home without any family.  So I drove up here.  Yes, I got confused.  The roads are narrow compared to Florida.  There's these things that we have here called hills, which meant that you can’t see long distances when you're driving down the road.  But I persevered and, after two days, I called her on the phone and I laid out all of the options.  Like there's book, it’s called an apartment finder and I opened it up.  These are the choices that we have. 

She said, “Fine.  Whatever.  You pick.” 

So I picked up an apartment up off of 400 and I drove home confident.  I had succeeded. Things were going to be fine. 

I got home and the next couple of weeks were a bit of a blur.  But about a week before we were set to move to Atlanta, she got in a fight with her parents.  It was the Monday morning and it was the first day of medical school at Emory.  Her mom had called and told her that she needed to call Emory Admissions and ask if someone had failed to show up and maybe she could take their spot.  She refused. 

There was a big fight but, eventually, she swallowed and her pride and she called Emory Medical School.  She said, “Did anyone fail to show up today,” and they're like, “Well, actually yes.  Someone did fail to show up today.  And if you can be here tomorrow, you can start medical school with the rest of the students.” 

So I was just shocked.  I mean, I had taken my wife’s side.  I was like, “Don’t call.  You're just going to embarrass yourself.” 

But there was this tornado in our bedroom of clothes and toothbrush, maybe a laptop, went into a suitcase and she got in the car with her mom and she said, “I’m going.  I'll come back in a week.  We’ll pack up and we’ll move to Atlanta the next weekend.” 

To understand the next part of the story, you have to know just a little bit description of my mother-in-law.  A lot of married folks in the audience, I can tell.  When I was little, a common playground taunt, I don't know if kids still use this, was, “Your mother wears combat boots.” 

Well, my mother-in-law wore combat boots.  She was a lieutenant colonel in the army’s Judge Advocacy Group.  To everyone who knew her, she was smart, she was direct, decisive but, to me, she was domineering.  So the next day, after a day in Atlanta, my wife calls me to deliver the third wrinkle in our plan, which was that her mother didn’t approve of the apartment that I had found.  It was too far from Emory and so, without discussing it with us, she had bought a condo in Decatur.  It’s okay.  We can rent it from her for the next couple of years as we’re students. 

Honestly, I remember that phone call very vividly because I had one of those feelings, just a bristling went through my body.  I just stood there silent for a minute and the only word that came out was, “No.” 

She's, “I don't understand.  What’s the problem?” 

I’m like, “We found this apartment together.  Your mother didn’t discuss it with us.  She didn’t include us in the decision.  We’re not going to live in that condo,” and I hung up the phone. 

The next day, we had a repeat of that conversation.  I had had some time to think so I took the moral high ground of it’s about principle.  You could list all of the pluses of the condo.  It’s closer, it’s nicer.  “It’s irrelevant.  Your mom will not be making the decisions for us.  We’re starting on our own in a new city and we’re going to make this on our own, with our own decisions.” 

So, at the end of that week, they came back to Florida and I had rented a shiny brand new U-Haul truck.  We loaded up all of our wedding gifts and the second-hand furniture that we had collected from friends and family, and we got in the U-Haul and we started driving north on I-75.  

If I was driving, we were driving to the apartment up off of 400.  If Elizabeth was driving, we were driving to the condo in Decatur.  So the next six to seven hours, we’re just in argument, fighting and yelling, and I was mean.  I was.  I was just mean. 

I said, “There's no way you're making me live in that condo.” 

If you've never driven north from Florida on your way to Atlanta, eventually you'll pass Macon and that’s the sort of signpost that you're almost to Atlanta.  There's a rest stop there.  It’s the last rest stop before you hit Atlanta.  So we pulled into that rest stop and we walked over to those concrete picnic tables under the pine trees and we sat down. 

We started eating the cold ham sandwiches that her mother had packed for us because she knew we would get hungry on that trip.  But we just stared at each other.  This is it.  We’re making a decision and we’re going to sit here until we make the decision.  So you can just imagine this young couple sitting at one of these benches and the cars are whizzing by and they're just staring at each other. 

Eventually, we realized that if we didn’t decide, we were now living at the rest stop just outside of Macon.  In a jolt of inspiration, I remembered that I had a 50-cent coin that I had carried since I was a little kid.  I found it.  Maybe I bought a pack of gum or something at the convenience store, so it was my lucky coin.  I had never needed it but I always knew it was there.  If I ever had to make a phone call home, I had that coin.  It would get me out of trouble. 

So I took it out of my wallet and I looked at her and I said, “How about if we let fate decide?  I’m going to flip the coin and, if it’s heads, we’re going to move into the apartment.  If it’s tails, we’re going to move into the condo.” 

She just stared at me like I was an idiot, but I didn’t say anything.  Eventually, she realized that was our only option and she agreed. 

So I took the coin and I placed it in my hand and I flipped it.  As it left my hand, my eyes started to follow the trajectory of the coin and I looked through and I saw my wife’s face.  I saw it for the first time.  It was red.  Her eyes were swollen and she had this look of anxiety and fear, and I realized that I put that there on her face.  In that instant, time just froze for me.  I was standing there looking at her with the realization that, for her, this wasn’t a fight over who was going to be calling the shots in our marriage.  It was her trying to please her mother and her new husband, two people that she loved very much. 

And looking back on that memory I know that, for me, it was about something more.  It was rooted in the fear about how I would prioritize the love of Elizabeth and the love of Physics, these two loves that I had carried around since I was 13 years old.  And how are we going to plan a life with these two different priorities? 

In an instant, the coin had reached the zenith of its arc and all of these wrinkles in our plan, it folded up like a paper airplane into the realization that I needed to make a decision.  I caught the coin and I flipped it onto my hand.  I looked at it and it was heads for the apartment. 

I looked at her and I smiled and, with the lightness in my heart and a warmth that had returned, I said, “We’ll live in the condo.” 

That day on the side of I-75 I decided that I would choose her and the love that we had built together.  It’s a decision that is echoed through seven years of difficult graduate school, the start of two careers, through the birth of three beautiful daughters and 19 years of marriage.  By far, it is the smartest decision that I have ever made in my life and I'll always be the better person for making it.  Thank you.