October 14: Went About With Him, 24th Wedding Anniversary, My Favorite Things

Everyone beamed at him [Zaphod], or at least, nearly everyone.  He singled out Trillian from the crowd.  Trillian was a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently while visiting a planet, just for fum, incognito.  She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes.  With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress, she looked vaguely Arabic.  Not that anyone there had ever heard of an Arab of course.  The Arabs had very recently ceased to exist, and even when they had existed they were five hundred thousand light-years from Damogran.  Trillian wasn't anybody in particular, or so Zaphod claimed.  She just went about with him rather a lot and told him what she thought of him.

There is no real love story in Hitchhiker's, unless you count Zaphod Beeblebrox being in love with himself.  The closest to a "normal" love relationship is the one between Zaphod and his girlfriend, the Earth woman, Trillian.  According to the passage above, Trillian "just went about with him rather a lot."  That's it.  No real commitment to each other.  They are conveniently involved, each giving the other something the other needs.  Zaphod needs a glamorous girl on his arm at governmental occasions, and Trillian needs someone to get her off her home planet.

Today is my 24th wedding anniversary.  That number surprises a lot of people.  It certainly surprises me.  It hardly seems possible that my wife and I have been married for close to a quarter century.  We have been through some pretty rocky times.  Yet, here we are--still together, still in love, still struggling with life's slings and arrows.

I have written essays and blog posts and poems about our life together, chronicling both the good and not so good.  Tonight, however, I want to simply tell you some of my favorite things about my wife:

• She can make me laugh, even at my very worst times.
• When I'm feeling particularly beaten down, she doesn't try to fill me up with false praise or empty hope.  She just loves me in my misery.
• She loves my poetry.
• She will tell me when a poem I write is crap.
• She tells me when I've fixed that crappy poem.
• She gave me two beautiful kids who have filled my existence on this planet with meaning.
• She forces me to be a better person than I am.
• She gave me another family to love--her sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews.  She multiplied my love.
• She has taught me that love is full of peaks and valleys.  Highs and lows.
• To this day, she is still the most beautiful woman I've ever known.
• She isn't perfect, and she doesn't expect me to be perfect.
• When I climb into bed tonight, I will feel her body next to mine.  She will keep me warm in the darkness.

Saint Marty thanks his endless love for 24 of the best years of his life.

October 13: Future Time, Cold Sweats, Full Life

"You know nothing of future time," pronounced Deep Thought, "and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design."

The future is something that I worry about.  A lot.  You may even say that I have been preoccupied with the future since I was a small child.  One of my recurring nightmares as a young person involved being in a van without a driver,  travelling down a long, unending road by myself.  No idea where I'm heading.  Just toward some distant, unknown destination.  I would wake up in cold sweats from this dream.

As an adult, this anxiety over the future hasn't subsided.  I still spend a great deal of time stressing over what tomorrow may bring.  You're probably thinking about now, "What's the point in worrying about the future?"  I agree with you.  Losing sleep over what MAY happen is a losing venture.  It doesn't make the future better or worse.  It simply makes me really tired.

I think it's a matter of control for me.  I like my days ordered and calm.  In the morning, when I wake up, I already have my itinerary planned out.  I make my "to do" list for the next day right before I go to bed.  I know what I will be doing, hour by hour.  That comforts me.  Leaves little room for disaster or surprise or accident.  Of course, it also leaves little room for unexpected joys, those happy moments when life takes a turn for the better instead of the worse.

I know that the future is beyond my control.  I know that the present is what I should be focusing on.  You don't have to remind me of this fact.  I have control over my actions and reactions today.  That's it.  I can prepare for a good tomorrow, but that doesn't guarantee that it will happen.  It doesn't even guarantee that I will have a good afternoon or evening. 

Here is what I know about today:  we are celebrating my birthday at my mother's house.  My sister is making prime rib, mashed potatoes, and tapioca pudding, three traditional Saint Marty's Day dishes.  In addition, people will sing "Happy Birthday" to me.  I may receive a gift or two.  Maybe not.  And tonight, if everything goes according to plan, my son will practice his trombone, and my daughter will focus on her homework.  Me?  I'll spend my last few hours before bedtime getting ready for tomorrow and the coming week.  Because I like the illusion of preparedness.

And tomorrow, I will celebrate my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary with my wife.  We will go out to our favorite little Italian restaurant for dinner.  Have some drinks.  Eat some good food.  Think about how our life together began.  Talk about the hopes and dreams we had.  Imagine what we would now tell those two young people who said "I do" almost a quarter century ago, when everything seemed possible.

The future still frightens me, because everything, at the moment, seems unsettled.  In the past 24 years, my life has been full of surprises, good and bad.  I've struggled, and I've rejoiced.  I've cried a lot, and I've laughed a lot.  And I've had a beautiful partner who's accompanied me on this long, winding road into the future. 

Saint Marty thinks that's pretty good definition of a full life.

October 8: Wonderful Horror, Beautiful Ugly, 24th Wedding Anniversary

Arthur stared about him in a kind of wonderful horror.  Ranged away before them, at distances he could neither judge nor even guess at, were a series of curious suspensions, delicate traceries of metal and light hung about shadowy spherical shapes that hung in the space.

I love the phrase "wonderful horror."  It's sort of like the term "beautiful ugly" or "awful joy."  A combination of opposites used to describe something that is full of ambiguity.  It tries to embrace the entirety of what is being described, whether it's a person, place, or experience.

When you think about it, nothing can truly exist without its opposite.  How can we know what light is without experiencing darkness?  Can one tree be beautiful without another tree being ugly?  If watching the Perseid meteor showers is full of wonder, then watching an equivalent event in nature must be full of horror, like Hurricane Katrina.  You see what I mean?  Each thing is defined by its antithesis.

I am approaching my 24th wedding anniversary this coming Monday.  My wife and I have been married for almost a quarter century, but we've been together for closer to 30 years.  Those years have been full of joys and sorrows.  They've been beautiful, and they've been ugly.  We've experienced peace, and we've experienced struggle.
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This pretty much describes any marriage.  It's impossible to be with the same person for a long period of time without problems arising.  It kind of goes with the territory.  Yet, it's that foundation of love that helps couples weather the storms.  Marriages fail when one partner or the other loses sight of that love, turns away, toward something that seems exciting or dangerous or both.

One of the biggest misconceptions of marriage is that it's always midnight swims, bodies naked under a coral moon.  Sure, those things still happen.  But most of the time, marriage is cooking spam omelettes because that's all that's in the refrigerator to eat and you can't afford to order a pizza.  Marriage is built on both the extraordinary and the extraordinarily mundane.

This past summer, there has been a lot of ugly to go along with the beautiful of our marriage.  We have been struggling, but we have also had moments of joy, including our little vacation in Mackinaw City.  We walked hand-in-hand along the shores of Lake Michigan, enjoying this simple moment of physical intimacy.  It was beautiful ugly.  Or lovely sad.  Or wonderful normal.

I wouldn't wish away any of these infinitely small moments of love I've shared with my spouse over the years.

They have made Saint Marty's marriage fragile strong.