Even More Unlikely Love
by Bill Shein

Two years ago, on this very page, I gleefully shared the details of an unlikely love story. It was the remarkable tale of an affair with my Web browser's pop-up blocker, a magical relationship that I predicted would last forever.

But a year later came "Another Unlikely Love Story," in which I shocked all of Western Massachusetts by revealing that I had left my beloved pop-up blocker for another woman. Well, not another "woman," exactly. The home-wrecker was the simple, curvaceous comma — the most beautiful punctuation mark I had ever met.

So it's with an unprecedented amount of embarrassment that today I confess another startling development in a love life that People magazine recently described as "wholly fabricated or at least mostly fabricated. But probably wholly fabricated."

Yes, today I must admit that those who condemned marriage between a man and a punctuation mark, and said such a union could never last, were right.

"Marriage is meant for a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman," you wrote in your angry letters, "but not for a man and a comma. That's just, um, wrong — even if no one can really explain why."

The reason for our split? Well, after a romantic wedding in Greece, complete with vows drawn from the Chicago Manual of Style, and then a year of wedded bliss, I simply fell in love with another woman. And while it's easy to see how someone like me could fall for a productivity-increasing pop-up blocker, or a punctuation mark that's integral to the writing life, my new relationship is virtually inexplicable.

Who is the mystery woman? My friends, I have fallen completely, totally, and irreversibly in love with my little iPod Shuffle music player. Yes, the runt of the iPod family — purchased for a mere $79 — turns out to be my true soul mate. And as with my previous romantic entanglements, I don't care who knows it.

What do I love about my iPod Shuffle? Well, for starters, she's cute as hell. Not flashy like the top-of-the-line video iPod with her fancy video screen and giant hard drive and huge price tag. Instead, iPod Shuffle is modest and unassuming, storing an ample 240 songs in her one-inch-square body. She plays them in order, or, to keep me on my toes, randomly.

From the day we met, we've been inseparable. At the gym, she's clipped onto my pocket while I pound the treadmill's rubber pavement. When I'm out walking the dog, she plays songs like "Hound Dog," showing her wit.

On a recent vacation, she strolled along the beach with me, playing just the right music to accompany the sunset and the quiet, rolling surf. In that setting, romance was inevitable, especially when she cued up Andy Gibb's 1977 romantic classic, "I Just Want to Be Your Everything." I was smitten.

(How an Andy Gibb tune found its way onto my iPod Shuffle is a complete mystery to me. Seriously.)

Fortunately, I'm still on good terms with my old pop-up blocker, so Web browsing remains trouble-free. And, as you can see in this very sentence, my ex-wife — the comma — remains a professional colleague.

Both have moved on to new relationships: pop-up blocker recently bought a house with her new boyfriend in Silicon Valley, and the comma is getting serious with a copy editor over at The Times. They seem happy.

And me and iPod Shuffle? Like Romeo and Juliet, we married in secret. Because her corporate parents would never allow her to marry a man who regularly rails against the evils of our modern corporate state and the dangerous distractions of popular culture — and that includes the technology used to distribute it. Capulet and Montague, indeed.

What does the future hold for us? Well, she's young, energetic, and our time together keeps me feeling younger than my 40 years. In fact, at the risk of offending a few readers of this family newspaper, let me just say that her battery is guaranteed to last for at least 12 hours. So this relationship will last — if it doesn't kill me first.

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Channeling Shakespeare, Bill Shein routinely asks his Apple iPod Shuffle to "deny thy father and refuse thy name!"

(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper on March 19, 2007. Read Bill's previous column, "Mr. Bush's Dangerous Budget" ).