Supercool Wedding

Ann and Meade's.

Congratulations and love to two extraordinary people who are creating a beautiful love story as we watch. May the inspiration of your wedding day carry through to every day of a long life together.

great deleted scenes, oracular arts and crafts, anniversary price tag

1. Finally watching a movie you’ve been putting off mistrustfully, and loving it so much you watch all the special features and deleted scenes.

2. Attending a show of crafts the kids made in summer camp: seeing the life they live when you’re not there, the aptitudes they didn’t know they had last month, the memories they’ll have fifty years from now, the roads they’ll go on their own.

3. Unplanned anniversary celebration with a former love: no gifts, no flowers, much laughter and free-hearted talk.

Bibliotherapy

When a marital therapy book looks promising, Mr. and Mrs. Dash buy two copies, one for each of them. When they’re both finished, they exchange copies to see what their partner has underlined.

They never underline the same passages. It’s like a pair of photos by two different photographers, where you can’t tell that they’re of the same landscape. Two soothsayers reading the same entrails and foreseeing two entirely different fates.

“The divorce is granted and the agreement is approved.”

It was first come first served at the uncontesteds’ counter, and I was the earliest to arrive, along with the junior lawyer who was shepherding me through. A simple and sometimes nonchalant process: after I passed through the metal detector in the courthouse lobby, she and I had tried to find each other by walking slowly around in the crowd and giving furtive are-you-the-one glances, trying to guess each other’s identity on the basis of vague descriptions, like a couple on a blind date.

In the elevator we talked about how she’d had a flat tire that morning and had used Fix-a-Flat, a recourse I highly recommend. It was my first time in a courtroom, and I sat in one of the rows of spectator seats, with four or five other about-to-be-divorced citizens and their lawyers waiting scattered. Our judge was a cranky type on the verge of retirement, the lawyer had advised me, but she turned out to be perfectly human. She mistakenly called the lawyer “sir” instead of “ma’am” and apologized smilingly, and she sounded sincere when she told me, “Good luck to you, sir,” at the end. It was just a matter of answering “correct” to seven or eight formulaic questions as the junior lawyer had coached me to in the hallway.

The judge entered the courtroom at 8:30 a.m. and by 8:35 I was on my way out, having been wished a friendly, “You can go now,” by the lawyer, who had another client to usher through. (“What a way to meet people,” that divorcee had told me as we chatted uncomfortably before the opening of the session.)

I wandered the halls. I lingered to read the family court docket, a long sheet of printout paper taped to a glass door: restraining orders, divorce trials, and assorted motions. I read the names of the parties and wondered who they were, what had brought them to this. Out on the street again I started walking to the state capitol, near which someone I know is going to start a job soon, and for some reason I started thinking of myself in the third person. “The man is walking up the hill. He looks at the bronze statue of a soldier next to the fountain. He turns around and heads for where his car is parked.” It made me feel better to think that way. At some point I was focused enough to drive home.

At some moments I wanted to plunge back into work and at others I wanted to lie down and sleep, so I alternated both strategies through the day. Waking up from a nap at 3:00, I warned myself that if I didn’t get up and get moving I might go into a downslide, not to mention bing unable to sleep once night came. So I went to the gym and that energized me. Then I dropped by the martial arts school to pay a test fee for the kids, then I went to pick them up from day camp, then I took the three of us for ice cream, and then I drove us home and made them take showers, they were filthy from playing in the dirt all day.

Writer Without a Story: The Man-Woman Thing

A middle-aged man wearing a conference nametag walks through the lobby of a hotel, a grateful smile on his face, tears flowing unrestrainedly down his cheeks in full view of airline pilots, flight attendants, bellhops, concierge, and arriving guests. What does he think he’s doing? What kind of New Age foolery have I gotten brainwashed into?

It could be that I’ve been working on my shame. Or my fear and terror. Or the accumulated pain of being a husband, an ex-husband, a father, a son, a brother. It doesn’t matter what has unlocked my tears. It doesn’t matter who I think I am or what particular hairpin turns and long straightaways have driven me here. I’m here, that’s all, I’m letting the tears flow in plain sight for the first time in my life. You look at me. Are you disgusted, worried, embarrassed, amused? Good. That’s what I want.

Let’s say we’ve been working on the man-woman thing. A lesbian has stood up and said that for the first time in her life, after doing one of our exercises, she has felt trust in men, and she invites any man to walk up and embrace her. A stunning woman in expensive clothes and perfect makeup has stood and told us what it has meant for her to be unapproachable, to be dependent on the armor of her face. A young man has stood and told us that when he was a child he molested younger boys. A man with an earring and a prim voice has told us he knows we think him effeminate, and he’s been thinking of himself that way all his life.

Or maybe sitting in morning meditation I felt hands clutching my arm and then a woman’s forehead leaning between those hands, and I put my free arm around her and held her, eyes closed, for half an hour as she shook and cried, my arm cramping, and I knew I would have stayed there till my arm fell off. And afterward she wrote me a letter and told me it was the first time in her life she understand what it felt like to be breathed by another human being.

Or I had sat on a lawn in the southern California springtime and shared worksheets with a woman who had been terribly hurt by a male relative as a preschooler, who told me that being with me was the first time she had ever felt free of her belief that men were shallow and harmful and untrustworthy, and then I’d watched as she stood in front of three hundred people and said so.

“It was like falling in love,” I told my roommate, and he said, “I would drop the ‘like.’” I didn’t know her last name or where she lived or what she did for a living. It wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t known her first name, either, or if we’d never exchanged a word. We worked together for an hour or two and shared a special meal. We looked into each other’s eyes and saw ourselves. Then we parted. And it didn’t matter if we never saw each other again, never spoke again during the school, although we did. We had gone through the entire course of a relationship, from first meeting to inevitable ending, in two hours.

Those women helped me as much as I them. The lesbian taught me that I am not suspect. The stunning woman taught me that I do not have to be either covetous or intimidated. The woman who leaned on me taught me that I am everyone and I don’t care who sees it. The woman I shared a meal with taught me that love arises and falls away and lasts forever at every moment.

And if I honor her and treasure her memory and wish her joy for all her life, how much more shall I do so for the woman who lived with me for sixteen years and bore my children and raised them with me and taught me and traveled with me and suffered from me, and who parted from me with the greatest honesty and kindness and wisdom?

Point of Agreement

He thinks every person is an equation. She thinks every person is a song.

They both think every couple is a war.

Ithaca: Reality and Dream

Don't wait around for any gritty, hard-hitting dramatic series about the Ithaca police department any time soon. This cute little yellow Beetle, with its rear windshield slogan "Cops, Kids, and Toys," is on special duty at the downtown Commons to persuade kids to stay off drugs -- although the lingering influence of 1960s psychedelia is not undiscernible on the car itself. The department also has normal cruisers, you'll be relieved to know; there was one parked in the Beetle's place later that night, with wet flurries speckling it.

Ithaca turns out to be a cute, old college town about the size of downtown Madison, with grand stone churches and brown-red brick homes. It's surprisingly hilly, but unlike San Francisco which has hill after hill after hill, here there's one immense main climb, with Cornell University at the top and the downtown area at the bottom, so if you're a student who lives downwtown you get great exercise walking to and from campus every day. Most students live at the collegiate top of the hill, though, and rarely go downtown because then they'd have to walk back uphill drunk at three every Saturday morning, punctually punching the ol' bar-crawl clock as they do. In both areas there are a lot of rundown student apartments -- one can only imagine how much profit the landlords, who have owned those houses forever, are making, considering the minimal amount of repair they seem to do.

Ithaca is the only city in my experience in which, if you're waiting to cross a street at a trafic light and you press the Walk button, you can see an immediate, direct, causal relationship between pushing the button and the light changing to green. Because of this, Ithacans go around happily pressing the Walk light button at every opportunity and waiting a split second for the light to change, even if there's no traffic in sight. Not only that, but at major intersections a woman's voice comes on, floatging thrugh the air to tell you things like, "Begin crossing Oak Avenue..." and five seconds later, "Do not begin to cross Oak Avenue if you are not already in the crosswalk." Then a little birdie cheeps twice.

The restaurant/cafe scene is rather thin; if a student brings his visiting parents to dinner, there are only a handful of choices, as in Madison circa 1980, and so at every place we stopped last night we ran into my son John's fellow law students. The places we did find were good, though. The coffeehouses, Stella's and Gimme! Coffee, both had dark reddish walls with little artworks and mirrors, creating an old-fashioned atmosphere (more so at Stella's because of its solid, dark wood booths) where you could linger and imagine yourself drinking absinthe and writing French poetry. For dinner we went to Za Za's, a family-style Italian restaurant in a big, 1950s-swank room with white tablecloths and chairs, an arched, padded ceiling, and a wonderful, completely unused Art Deco bar with a big hourglass-shaped lamp and a sky ceiling, dark blue with pinprick stars. If I lived in Ithaca I would hang out there and sip gibsons and make it a hip discovery amng my (imaginary) in-crowd. (But what kind of restaurant wwebsite requires Macromedia Flash? If you're searching for a restaurant online, you have to have that software on your computer in order to figure out whether to eat there.)

After Za Za's we walked through wet snowfall (a sign of the unusually warm winter in upstate New York this year) to Felicia's Atomic Lounge, a likably grungy hangout with an unobtrusively sapphic vibe, tin squares on the bar wall, and a Leo Kottke-imitating singer-guitarist who was impressive and enjoyable when he fingerpicked his acoustic, and obnoxious when he plugged in and sang his magnum opus denouncing the sexual promiscuity of Paris Hilton, recruiting three young women from the audience as backups to sing a chorus of the crudest, most misogynistic insults.

Well, what do you expect in one of our leading university communities?

Earlier, Ann had been with us as we stalked the downtown area in search of things to quip about. Ann's got a good post about that part of the day, culminating in a YouTube video in which she, John, and I riff off each other about the window display in a used record store. Unfortunately, most of my witty remarks are scarcely audible, the microphone having been at a distance. Listening, I remember the riff extending over seventeen years (including my relative inaudibility), covering every passing phenomenon that intruded into our fields of vision, and ranging in tone from full symbiosis to raging hostility.

As I reach a certain point in life, it seems in retrospect impossible to tell reality from illusion. What did one really feel, what was one convincing oneself to feel, what was one convinced by others to feel, why doesn't one feel it anymore, what happened to change it, was the change positive or negative? I'm not just referring to a specific marriage but to any kind of love, any attraction or repulsion, including my current satisfaction with solitary life. Yet more than any time in the past twenty years or so, I want to touch once again my memories of long-gone people and places, to try to reclaim who I was and what resemblance remains to who I am now. To reclaim all of myself, past present future. Otherwise it's like breathing thin air. Deep companionship is bleached to casual acquaintanceship overnight; I visit someone I've spent the past almost two decades with and think, "What a beautiful woman, I'd like to meet her." (Notice I'm conflating two marriages here. That's part of the illusion-building process. Sometimes I don't know which I'm remembering.)

Maybe the mystery of changing identity explains the dream I had early this morning: I was visiting Ithaca New York, but it looked like a Greek island, with rocky cliffs to which I sailed on a little ferry. The natives were old-style New Yorkers, cordially rude Italians and Jews, and they worked and shopped in big underground caves that looked like subway stations, and I was baffled and worried but as I stayed and found my way I began to understand.

Snow flurries again this morning. This afternoon I fly to Austin via Detroit. The scenery keeps shifting.

Strait is the Gate

Which way am I supposed to go, I wonder?

I expect I'll see a similar sign at the entrance to the Pearly Gates.

Meanwhile, though, I'm sitting in a major airport hub, waiting for my traveling companion. I expect she's blogging away somewhere in the concourse, maybe even at the gate, but a glance at her site shows she has not yet posted about her travels. It's 15 minutes till boarding, and I wasn't sure I was going to figure out how to get the photo from my borrowed camera into my computer and onto blogger in time -- but I have, I have! That makes it worth the $8/day internet service at DTW.

The first airplane flight I ever took landed at this airport, in 1969 when it was called Detroit Metro Airport. Looking out the big windows, I recognize the flat land, the thin snow, the bright blue, still, winter sky. The airport itself is much expanded and improved, but this time I'm not paying $24 dollars for student standby ($48 full fare), and this time we had to wait standing in the air of the tiny plane so that the short-handed airline could track down an employee, somewhere, anywhere, any employee, to connect the jet bridge to the plane. Moddin times, mon.

That first flight could be a post in itself: a waiting area full of New York college kids on their way to Michigan, getting to know each other on the fly, asking what dorms we were in, orming spontaneous groups to hunt down refreshments... I was waiting with my father, who'd driver me from the Bronx to LaGuardia, and when someone invited me to join a group prowling the airport, I first said, "No, I have to stay here with my father," but when I looked to check with Dad, he told me it was my choice; and I chose to go with the peer group, and that was the beginning of leaving home.

To the North Country Fair

Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying to snow country to see one of my grown offspring at an academic occasion. I’ll be taking my computer and hoping to get in a couple of posts here and there, spurred on by the presence of a fellow blogger, who I know always brings her blogging paraphernalia.

I envision us sitting opposite each other at a café table, hunched behind our barricades -– I mean our computers – peeking out suspiciously while simulblogging each other’s quirks.

By sheer chance, we’ll be on the same plane from the hub airport to the destination, and on the way back. We won’t be at the same hotel though, because she always stays at the best place in whatever city she’s in, while I tend to choose…a different point on the spectrum.

I’m hoping it’ll be a lot of fun, and I’d like to take some photos if my hands don’t freeze off while pressing the shutter. I’m not used to that kind of thing anymore.