October 13, 2025: “True Love,” Wedding Anniversary, “Mary Olivering”

It has been a quiet, calm Monday for once.  Nothing terrible happened, except for the alarm going off and waking me up this morning.  Most of my faithful disciples know that I’m not a big fan of Sundays or Mondays.  I find them depressing.  Today, I was pretty much by myself in my library office.  All . . . day . . . long.  And I’ve loved every second.

Now, I’m not a misanthrope.  Every once in a while, however, I need to retreat and recharge.  Today was a recharging day.  Tomorrow, my wife and I will celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.  We dated for five years prior to tying the knot.  That means we have been a part of each other’s lives for 35 years  I wish I could say it has been all rainbows and unicorns, but I live in reality, not a rom-com.  True love ain’t pretty.

Sharon Olds meditates on . . . 

True Love

by: Sharon Olds

In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I hobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

It’s such an intimate, tender moment Olds describes here—one of those stolen moments most married people with kids will recognize.  Yes, Olds and her husband ended up divorcing eventually, but every love story (successful or failed) is made up of these kind of sweet, stolen times.

I’m a lucky guy.  I found the love of my life pretty early, and I got to spend my life with her.  Sure, we’ve had some touch-and-go periods because of mental illness and addictions.  We even separated for a year.  Yet, to paraphrase Elton John, we’re still standing.

And we have two beautiful, smart kids—one in medical school, one about to graduate from high school.  We are well beyond the quickies-when-the-kids-are-asleep phase.  Currently, we are in the hey-we-can-take-an-afternoon-nap phase.  (For my younger disciples, let me say that EVERYONE eventually realizes that naps are God’s greatest creation, with sex coming in a distant second.)

Falling in love is easy.  Staying in love for close to 40 years?  Now, that takes some seriously hard work.  People change over time.  It’s inevitable.  One passion gives way to another passion.  You give up computer science to study creative writing.  You take a temp job at an outpatient surgery center to pay the bills, and you end up temping there for 25 years.

Life has a way of throwing you curve balls.  It’s simply a matter of finding the right person to stand behind home plate with you.  I was lucky enough to hit a home run.

Saint Marty wrote a sort-of love poem for tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:

On this day in 1962, Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway.  Write a poem where you take the name of an author and have it reoccurring in your poem in surprising ways.  If you don’t know where to begin, use the image of walking into an old or used bookstore and reaching for a book.

Mary Olivering

by: Martin Achatz

I always return to you, Mary Oliver, when I hear

the oar train hurtle through 3 a.m. on its way

to Lake Superior, return to those peaceful Mary moments

of marsh and heron, snakes luxuriating in puddles

of sun, bears muzzling honey from tree trunks.  Return

to the grove of Oliver trees you planted, nursed,

pruned with so much joy and grief that I can still

smell your cigarette smoke as I wander through

the orchard, squeezing each Oliver on the branches

for ripeness.  Some yield to my pinches, almost blush,

as if I’m at a middle school dance and just pressed

my lips to my crush’s neck, incanted her name—

Mary, oh, Mary, yes, Mary!—as Simple Minds flooded

the gym and everyone’s bodies swayed, arched

in adolescent desperation.  

I bring my pail of Olivers home, whip up some  

pancake batter, stir them in delicately so they won’t

bruise or burst.  In the morning, when my wife

stumbles into the kitchen. I will hand her a plate

piled with Mary pancakes.  I’ll watch her fork

pieces between her lips.  As she chews, I’ll sit beside

her and wonder what we’re going to do with the

wild and precious day ahead.

October 30: Got On My Knees, Wife's 47th Birthday, True Love

 Merton's loses his grandfather . . . 

In the fall of 1936 Pop died.  The manner of his death was this. I had been on a geology field trip in Pennsylvania, and had come back, late one Sunday night after a long cold ride through New Jersey, back from the coal mines and the slate quarries, in an open Ford. The icy wind of the Delaware Water Gap was still in my flesh. I went to bed without seeing anybody. They were all in their rooms by the time I got home. 

The next morning I looked in Pop’s room, and he was sitting up in bed looking strangely unhappy and confused. 

“How do you feel?” I said. 

“Rotten,” he answered.  There was nothing surprising about that. He was always getting ill. I supposed he had caught another cold. I said: 

“Take some more sleep, then.” 

“Yes,” he said, “I guess I will.” 

I went back into the bathroom, and hastened to dress and drink my coffee and run for the train. 

That afternoon I was on the track, in the pale November sun, taking an easy work-out. I came down the shady side of the field, in front of the library. There was one of the juniors who worked for the Yearbook standing behind the high wire fence, at the corner nearest John Jay, where the bushes and poplar trees were. As I came down to the bend he called out to me and I went over to the fence. 

“Your aunt was on the phone just now,” he told me. “She said your grandfather is dead.” 

There was nothing I could say. 

I trotted back along the field and went down and took a quick shower and got into my clothes and went home. There was no train but one of those slow ones, that ambled out on to the Island half empty, with long stops at every station. But I knew there was no particular hurry. I could not bring him back to life.

Poor old Pop. I was not surprised that he was dead, or that he had died that way. I supposed his heart had failed. It was typical of him, that kind of death: he was always in a hurry, always ahead of time. And now, after a whole long lifetime of impatience, waiting for Bonnemaman to get ready to go to the theater, or to come to dinner, or to come down and open the Christmas presents, after all that, he had brooked no delay about dying. He had slipped out on us, in his sleep, without premeditation, on the spur of the moment. 

I would miss Pop. In the last year or two we had drawn rather close together. He often got me to come to lunch with him downtown and there he would tell me all his troubles, and talk over the prospects for my future—I had returned to the old idea of becoming a newspaper man. There was a great deal of simplicity about Pop. It was a simplicity, an ingenuousness that belonged to his nature: and it was something peculiarly American. Or at least, it belonged to the Americans of his generation, this kind and warmhearted and vast and universal optimism. 

When I got to the house, I knew where I would find his body. I went up to his bed-room and opened the door. The only shock was to find that the windows were all open and the room was full of the cold November air. Pop, who in his life had feared all draughts and had lived in overheated houses, now lay under a sheet in this icy cold death-chamber. It was the first death that had been in the house that he had built for his family twenty-five years before. 

Now a strange thing happened. Without my having thought about it, or debating about it in my mind, I closed the door and got on my knees by the bed and prayed. I suppose it was just the spontaneous response of my love for poor Pop—the obvious way to do something for him, to acknowledge all his goodness to me. And yet, I had seen other deaths without praying or being even drawn to pray. Two or three summers before an old relative of mine had died, and the only thing that had occurred to me was the observation that her lifeless corpse was no more than a piece of furniture. I did not feel that there was anybody there, only a thing. This did not teach me what it taught Aristotle, about the existence of the soul... 

But now I only wanted to pray.

It's a strange thing when it happens--the urge to prostrate yourself and pray.  Merton says as much.  He hasn't had any real religious education,  Just brief encounters with Quakers and Catholics and Protestants.  At points in his young life, he's felt the pull of what Christians call the Holy Spirit--a breath of divine fire moving through him.  Yet, that fire has never consumed him.  Yet.  

Today was my wife's 47th birthday.  We have been together since she was 16.  If you do the math, that's 31 years.  We've been married for 25 of those years.  I remember that first time I celebrated her birthday with her.  I put signs on her front lawn.  Picked her up from school in a car decked out with balloons.  Took her out to dinner and had roses sitting on the table where we ate--a Mexican restaurant that no longer exists.  And I remember kissing her goodnight, an unforgettable kiss.  To quote The Princess Bride, "Since the invention of the kiss there have been five kisses rated the most passionate, the most pure.  This one left them all behind"

In the 31 birthdays since, we have had some serious struggles, times that dragged me to my knees to pray, as Merton does in the passage above.  I think only real love can bring you to that place of humility and desperation, when all you can do is kneel and say, over and over, "Helphelphelphelp."  It's the most basic and truthful prayer a person can utter.

Because asking for help is an act of surrender, of realizing that there is nothing more you can do.  You're in over your head.  True love is like that.  You drown in it.  Can't control it.  When you love a person like that, you open yourself up to the possibility of moments of transcendent joy (the birth of a child) and crushing heartbreak (the revelation of betrayal).  That's the nature of love.

In our time together, I have experienced the full spectrum of love with my wife.  The dark moments have been pretty dark, and the light moments have been blinding.  Love can be taken for granted, especially one that you've come to depend upon for a very long time.  And then one day, like Merton, you find that love is gone, and you will never have its comfort again.  Like blowing out candles on a birthday cake.

Love is complicated, and tonight I celebrate the complicated person who has been my partner in crime for over three decades.  She has made me dance and driven me to my knees.

Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of his wife.

August 8: Recover my Equilibrium, True Love, Disney Versus Pixar

Merton falls in love again . . .

I got out of the sanatorium in a month or six weeks. With the end of June, came our big examination—the higher certificate, which I took in French and German and Latin. Then we went away for the vacation, and I settled down to wait until September for the results of the exam. Pop and Bonnemaman and John Paul were once again in Europe for the summer, and we all spent a couple of months in a big, dreary hotel in Bournemouth, standing on top of a cliff and facing the sea with a battery of white iron balconies, painted silver, so that they gleamed in the pale, English summer sun and in the morning mist. I will not go into the emotions of that summer, in which I and a girl I met there kept going through storms of sentiment alternating with adolescent quarrels, during which I used to escape from Bournemouth into the Dorset downs and wander around for the whole day in the country trying to recover my equilibrium. 

But at the end of the summer, when she went back to London, and my family also took the boat at Southampton and went home, I packed up my rucksack and went into the New Forest, with a pup tent, and sat down under some pine trees at the edge of a common a couple of miles from Brockenhurst. Oh, the tremendous loneliness of that first night in the forest!  The frogs sang in the brackish stream, and the fireflies played in the gorse, and occasionally a lone car would pass along the distant road, exaggerating the silence by the sound that died in the wake of its passing. And I sat in the door of my tent, uneasily trying to digest the eggs and bacon I had fried and the bottle of cider I had brought out from the village. 

She had said she would write me a letter, addressed to the post office at Brockenhurst, as soon as she got home, but I thought this camp site at the edge of the common was too dreary. Besides, the water of the stream tasted funny and I thought maybe I might get poisoned, so I moved on down toward Beaulieu, where I did not have to eat my own cooking, but ate in an inn. And I spent the afternoon lying in the grass in front of the old Cistercian abbey, copiously pitying myself for my boredom and for the loneliness of immature love. At the same time, however, I was debating in my mind whether to go to a “Gymkhana,” that is a sort of a polite amateur horse-show, and mingle with all the gentry of the county, perhaps meeting someone even more beautiful than the girl for whom I thought I was, at the moment, pining away even unto death. However, I wisely decided to avoid the tents of such a dull affair.

Love is a difficult thing.  Most modern movies would have you believe that, after a bunch of complications and confusements, the boy and girl declare their undying love for each other, get married, and live happily ever after.  It doesn't quite work like that.  Even after saying "I do" to each other, the boy and girl will continue to experience complications and confusements until death they do part.

I hate to sound like a pessimist, but those are the facts.  Fairy tale endings are just that--fairy tales.  In reality, true love is hard work, day after day.  Some days are easier than others, and some are harder.  If you aren't up for that, I would recommend moving to marsh in North Carolina and living in a shack.  Or finding a religious order that requires a vow of isolation.  That's the only way to avoid heartbreak that I can think of, and, even with those precautions in place, love may still find you, and, therefore, heartbreak, too.

Now, the question to ask is this:  is love worth the heartbreak?  At the moment, I'm not sure I can answer that question.  In fact, I don't think I will ever be able to answer it.  At various times during my life, my kids have declared, loudly, "I hate you!"  I think that's some kind of rite of passage for children.  My wife and I have tottered back and forth between stability and collapse in our marriage, due to various issues.  Mental illness and sexual addiction primarily.

I truly wish that Walt Disney was right.  I want to live in a feature cartoon where, after defeating the evil queen's wicked spell, boy and girl ride off in a horse-drawn carriage as the music swells and 5,000 doves take wing.  I don't want to be in a Pixar movie, where true love ends in the jaws of a hungry barracuda in the first five minutes, or in a montage that covers a love from first kiss to last breath in about two minutes.

 I am not going to give you any kind of definitive answer in this post tonight.  I don't know if love is worth heartbreak.  Just like I don't know if I'm in a Disney or Pixar movie.  Happily ever after or barracuda attack.  Falling in love is easy.  Staying in love--that's where it gets tricky.                                     
Saint Marty will sleep tonight, dreaming Disney dreams.  A couple wine coolers will help with that.  The miracle of alcohol.