Friday, December 30, 2005

Brokefoot Relationship

Can any relationship survive a broken foot? I think not. Love is based intently on one’s ability to walk away from the beloved and then return when the beloved has stopped ranting.

As it says in that book “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran that everyone used to give as a shower gift, “let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you…stand together, yet not too near together, for the pillars of the temple stand apart and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

It’s hard to let those winds of heaven dance between you when one of you has two broken feet. The cypress becomes overly dependent on the oak tree to help her out, and the oak tree is often out in the yard having a smoke.

The least fortuitous time to fall in the yard and break both your feet is during football season when the game is on. I went unheard for several minutes, as helpless as Daryl Hannah on land when her feet would turn back into one big useless, flopping fish tail.

But eventually I was rescued and carried away by paramedics. For a couple of days after that, while waiting for an opening in a surgical schedule, the Beloved and his brother transported me like a corpse in a murder mystery. I was rolled in a blanket, carried down the stairs like a rug and tossed into the back of a van whenever I had to report to doctors who would hold up my x-rays and make wise diagnoses like, “Well, you really did it to yourself, didn’t you?”

Then I spent six weeks in a wheelchair and another six on crutches, none of that as annoying as not being able to drive myself. If there had been automobiles when Gibran wrote his poem on marriage, he certainly would have opined that love means never having to commute together on a daily basis.

The Beloved and I have shared a fundamental and critical difference in body temperature since we met. I am always hot. He is always cold. My philosophy on cold is put on a sweater. His philosophy on cold is crank the heat. My philosophy on cranking the heat is that breathing heated air dries out your nasal passages and leads to nose picking and cold catching. His philosophy on wearing a sweater is he’s not moving into Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. It’s unmanly.

His love of heated spaces extends to the car. Whereas I am a cold start driver --start the car, scrape the windows and go – he goes out 20 minutes early, starts the car, turns up the heat as high as it will go, and leaves it running unattended. He says this is the proper way to start a cold car on a cold day. I say that’s how a cold car becomes a stolen car.

Getting in a car warmed up in this way is like climbing inside a pizza oven, and it’s even hotter when you’re already dressed for cold weather. I loosen my scarf and roll down the window, dramatically gasping for air, which officially kicks off our first fight of the commute, quickly followed by the second fight of the commute – no, we don’t have time to mail my letter or return my movie to the video store, but yes, we do have time to get his cigarettes.

The merge onto the highway begins the third fight of the commute, namely why do men drive so aggressively? Why can’t they all just get along? If another driver offends you, turn the other cheek. But no, the Beloved’s world is divided into the Beloved vs. Everybody Else and Everybody Else is a dumb ass, which, if you are behind a steering wheel, is pronounced, DUMBASS!!!!

The dumb asses maneuver dangerously to get one car ahead, causing the Beloved to feel the need to speed up on their dumb ass, one-car-ahead tail so he can gesticulate at them. Dumb asses slowing down to dial their cell phones must be verbally abused and passed.

If I was a contestant on “Fear Factor,” the most terrifying thing they could do is make me drive a stretch of highway surrounded by an auto carrier, a cement truck, a flatbed truck hauling logs and an oversized motor home driven by undersized senior citizens. When I see any of them on the road, I fall way back, leaving plenty of room to make defensive maneuvers when the other vehicle rolls over or loses its cargo. The Beloved speeds up to pass them…on a curve.

By the time we arrive at my office, I am quivering, stressed out and disoriented by my life flashing repeatedly before my face.

When we were commuting separately, the Beloved would arrive home first in the afternoon and quickly anesthetize himself with back to back episodes of Judge Joe Brown where, no matter what kind of bad day you had, these people are having a worse one. By the time I got home, he was over his bad day and hiding in the garage so he wouldn’t have to hear about my bad day.

Commuting together, we’re like two Japanese fighting fish sharing a bowl. Our competing bad day complaints are spit into the overheated air of the car while we chase dumb asses down the highway in the gathering dusk. I start imagining my marriage is a disaster, but then I remember it’s only my foot and as soon as I can drive again, like The Prophet says, that big necessary space in our togetherness will return.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Miracle of the Sunglasses

My God is a small God. Some people have big Gods, Old Testament style Gods, who do mighty works. Mine pretty much finds things I’ve lost. Maybe my prayers are being monitored by a guardian angel that is particularly adept at finding things and not much else. In any case, it’s a miracle story I offer here.

I’ve been praying lately for money to solve an assortment of pesky obligations that would clean up my checkered past and allow me to proceed with the rest of my life without that burden. It would not enrich me; just de-stress me, so it doesn’t seem too much to ask.

I would hazard a guess that not many people actually get their prayers for cold cash answered. Since I don’t buy lottery tickets, I’m not even giving God an easy way to provide for me. And I’m probably not taking into consideration that He already does in His own way. I manage to get the bills paid every month, even when it involves transferring a debt from one credit card to another.

But so far, every single prayer to find my cat has been answered, usually within 20 minutes if not sooner. I have a cat that gets lost several times a year, and I’ll put in an hour or two searching for him without heavenly intervention, and then, weary and frustrated, I finally pray. I delay so long because I hate to bother God with prayers about finding a renegade cat. And then, I find him. I find him where he wasn’t a moment ago – which is not unusual for cats.

One time I found him in a particularly dramatic heavenly way. When we lived in a house surrounded by woods, he had been gone for several hours. Both my husband and I had searched through the underbrush as long as we had daylight and then with flashlights until our legs and arms were bleeding from the briars and thorns. My husband was particularly attached to this cat and was almost in tears when I told him we should give up; it just wasn’t meant to be. He went inside and I returned to the yard to collect one of our other cats, a good girl who never strayed and was helping us look for the lost cat.

Walking across the lawn, I said a silent prayer that for my husband’s sake, could God please locate the missing cat, scoop him up and drop him in our yard? I bent to pick up the good cat and the motion detector light attached to the garage came on. Right in the middle of the pool of light sat the missing cat, as if he had dropped from the sky and landed in a spot he had not been one second ago.

I’ve grown accustomed to these little miracles. It’s not just the cat, but many other missing and misplaced items that only turn up after I’ve prayed.

So, after another morning of a prayer turned up the lost cat again, I contemplated why I had a God that was so good at the small things, but didn’t trust me with $50,000? Well, I thought, how about something a little harder. Find my husband’s sunglasses.

I had never prayed about the sunglasses before because it was my husband’s problem more than mine. On the daily roster of things causing me stress, it ranked low, even though I had wasted several hours that week looking for them. They had been missing for a week and I had already conducted several thorough searches of the house, yard and both cars. They were nowhere. I quizzed my husband repeatedly about the last time he remembered having them, and he stuck to the same story that they had been in his way while he was sawing a branch off the crepe myrtle tree and he remembers putting them on a shelf in the bathroom. We assumed they had fallen off the shelf into the wastebasket below and went out unnoticed with the trash. They were gone for good.

A few hours after I offered that challenge, a challenge I didn’t think God would take seriously since I was so sure the sunglasses were in the county dump, I was sitting on a bench in the backyard, keeping an eye on the wandering cat again. And then I saw them, the sunglasses, in the grass next to the crepe myrtle.

How could this be? Surely we had looked around the crepe myrtle as part of the initial search? I had been in this very spot several times during the week, watching the cats. That very morning when I was searching for the lost cat, I had looked under the bushes next to the crepe myrtle. If the glasses were there then, wouldn’t I have seen them?

The only possible answer was they weren’t there then. My guardian angel, on assignment from God and hearing my foolish challenge that morning, had flown to the dump, gotten the glasses and dropped them where I would be sitting that afternoon. It’s a miracle.

It’s a miracle that reminds me my prayers are heard and that I should have more faith that even the big things will work out the way He intends for me, in His own time.

Saturday, January 8, 2005

Resolution: To Be Happier By Myself

My New Year's resolution is not to spend New Year's with my husband anymore, or travel with his band on road trips. Holidays are not special days. They are just days designated as special. You can make any day with family and friends equally as important. New Year's Eve is, for small-time musicians, the most lucrative gig of the year.

For some reason, musicians are considered a catch. There must be something romantic or sexual about watching someone perform and knowing you'll be the one with them after the show. But the reality is, there is probably no more miserable life for a woman than to be with a musician. If you go with them, you have to show up early for the equipment load-in. You sit at a table alone or with other bored wives and girlfriends during the show. You're the last one to leave because of the load-out. Every drunken guy and girl in the bar wants to talk to your guy and hold up his departure. They shout for encores when you're praying for the show to end.

If you don't go, you're often home alone or making other plans for Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes he even plays on Sundays, usually at benefits that pay nothing.

He needs thousands of dollars worth of equipment to earn $80 for a seven-hour gig. Because it is so prevalent and somehow enhances their creativity, musicians often abuse drugs and alcohol while playing. Neither is inexpensive. I've seen many a paycheck for the entire band eaten up by the bar tab.

My first realization of 2005 was I'd rather be happy and alone then with him and miserable on these road trips. This last one, I sat in the van listening to satellite radio while they unloaded and set up. No one could believe I'd rather do this then sit in the tiki bar the homeowner had constructed next to their house and get a jump on drinking with the early arrivals. At the beginning of every party, everyone is always happy, excited and cordial.

I moved into the house during the duration of the show. The band was playing in a frigid garage, heated by one dubious propane heater. The drinkers became progressively louder, then just insanely loud. I could tell the hour was approaching 2 a.m. as the noise died down and the drinkers became disgruntled and belligerent. People who wanted to drive drunk leaned on their car horns while designated drivers sat on the hoods of the car. Angry neighbors shouted the time out windows like cuckoo clocks. “It's 2 in the morning! It's 2 in the morning!”

There was much searching for misplaced possessions, including a missing dog that I spotted several times trotting around in the neighbor's yard. None of the inebriated could formulate or carry out a plan to search for the dog, so they just bleated with despair, and then anger, that the dog was gone. Then as the hour approached 3 a.m., there was vomiting, stumbling and passing out.

Some guy had been talking to my husband for an hour, and my kind husband gave this meandering, senseless monologue his undivided attention. Meanwhile, his equipment was not making it back into the van where I sat, listening in the dark to all this hellish commotion and crying with boredom. I wanted the party to end. This is not how I want to spend my time. But my husband insists this is all part of the “job” and he is having a good time. If so, then I'm just ruining it for him by being so miserable.

As you get older, you realize how little time you have left and you don't want to waste any of it. The greater good is no longer to accompany my husband on these trips to preserve our togetherness. If it splits us up, so be it. I just can't be this bored anymore.