Day and Night

My wife and I are so very different from one another. They say that people grow more alike through the years together, but frankly I cannot imagine there being enough years remaining to me to satisfy the demands of the yawning chasm between us. Rather, the gulf is not yet done with growing.

We are opposites, as perfectly so as day and night. I am cerebral, she is intuitive. I am poetic, she is practical. I am forgiving, she is vengeful. I am slow, she is fast. I deliberate, she decides. I am calm, she is a fury. I wear my heart on my sleeve, hers is guarded by seven fiery angels.

Her dream car is a Mercedes. I will take anything that runs. She wishes to expand. I would rather shrink. She feels identified in the world by the things she possesses. I feel incurably alienated.

My wife knows what she wants, and therefore what is lacking. I have pretty much what I want at all times. She is an extrovert, I am an introvert. She has scads of friends, I have two friends--my first ex-wife and my wife's ex-husband.

She dreams. I ruminate.

She is young. I am old.

She does not love those who do not love her. I love even my enemies.

She makes a profit. I break even, if I'm lucky.

She is beautiful, and I am homely.

She is healthy, I am sick.

And more amazing than what I have already written above is the fact that I really have not even started yet.

(P.S. -- We dress alike)

Come Back Here With My Life!

For the first time in more than 3 years I am separated from my wife, who has gone to California for 4 days. She is still a fairly new wife, being the third of who knows how many to come, and so the pangs of separation seem new as well, though experienced already in the dim past of other marriages.

When the woman leaves, it seems like she removes more than just herself. It seems that somehow she takes along a great portion of what makes the days special. The lion's share of the marriage seems to fall away like an unevenly cut loaf of bread, leaving the man with the crumbs which make him crave the slice.

Drive, purpose, initiative, not to mention a sort of tender tyranny, fly away with her, divesting the hours of any particular point.

And suddenly the floor, the tables, the sofa and chairs, the beds and the stairways are magically populated by all sort of things that should not be there--dishes, crayons, papers, bits of mail, dust balls in the corners, chunks of earth, broken toys, cups, cups, cups, and spiders; grocery bags, potato chips, hats and shirts and shoes--and the whole mess together altogether defies comprehension. I know not how this happened, but only that it must somehow be rectified by Tuesday.

Which is still three days away. No rush. By some unusual circumstance they may go away on their own.

In the meantime, I find that either the visit counter on this blog has gone kerplooey, or actually no one has visited here in three days. Can it be? It's a lonely feeling under the circumstances. And so if you really are there, please say something for heaven's sake. I feel like I've offended everyone at the same time--as if I possessed any such power to come up with such a perfectly comprehensive offense.

Paranoia sets in, you see--loneliness, silence, doubt, ennui--and the man is left to commune with the near empty vessel that he really is. Either that or talk to the boring-ass Chihuahua.

Anniversary(s)

Yesterday was my third wedding anniversary with my third wife.

This morning I did some calculating. Adding up my years of marriage to various wives (one at a time, of course), I came up with the number 25. I am presently 55 years old, so this means I have spent 30 of my years unmarried, 25 married.

I was first married at 20 years of age, but to be fair I will calculate adulthood, along with a marriageable state, from the age 18.

(This math is beginning to become difficult).

So . . .

I find that I have been with wife for 25 of my 37 adult years.

My immediate sense is that this cannot be right. I must take the math to an accountant for verification. I cannot remember being in a state of un-wife-ed-ness for 12 years. True, these 12 were spaced out over time, not consecutive, yet it still seems a more generous chunk of time than I can account for.

Where was I during these years, I wonder.

This may be something that would bear further investigation. It may, for instance, be of interest to my children, or my grandchildren. But probably not.

I think that for roughly half these 12 years I was stuck in daycare, and for the other half stuck in a bottle. Details, however, are lacking.

If you have the number sequence 9-13-3, what number comes next?

Again, I would guess in this case that certain details and variables are lacking.

I remember when I turned 50 having the sense that I had only just begun to live. Up to that point I had been too busy. Or married. But at 50 my ship had finally drifted free of the dock, all the ropes undone and hanging loose.

Then I was diagnosed with MS. Now I'm not saying that MS ended my life or anything like that, but it has kind of cramped my style. It is difficult to take the tiger by the tail when you can't stay awake long enough to hold on.

Better then to be caged than killed, I suppose. Although the two likely add to one and the same sum in the end.

**Author's note: It occurred to me after posting the above that some substantial portion of these foggy 12 years of un-wife-ed-ness can be accounted for in the state of engage-ed-ness that from time to time existed. As such, I will subtract 4 years and 2 months from the 12 unmarried years, leaving a balance of 7 years and 8 months.

My Mama Done Told Me

Love is lovelier
the second time around;
Just as wonderful
with both feet on the ground . . .
--Sinatra (along with whoever wrote the song)

Aside from being lovelier the second time around, love has also a greater degree of sanity on repetition, which makes it not only better, but safer, especially from an MS point of view--for I am convinced that love (and divorce and sorrow and bitterness) made a significant, if not preeminent, contribution to the flash frying of my brain some three years ago.

I guess that's what happens when you play with fire . . . and there is a certain sort of love that burns just as surely, just as deeply, and scars just as permanently.

My mama done told me, when I wasn't knee high . . .

How much of love, what percentage of love, was actually lunacy, I cannot say. It was all mixed up together, a perfect tangle of passion and prudence, confidence and fear, tenderness and harshness.

My mama done told me, son . . .

I guess the simple way to say it, minus the music and lyrics, is that practice makes a difference, and experience pays out in wisdom (or at least patience, which is the next best thing). It pays also to seek a partner who has passed as well through the same sort of mill (sorry guys, no virgins here).

A woman will sweet talk, and give you the big eye, but when her sweet talkin's done . . .

At the same time, there are lovers in this world who continually seek the same sort of madness that killed things the first time around, mistaking passion for meaning, intensity for content. Tricked by love, they enter into the same uneven, unworkable contracts, Love becomes an opiate, a narcotic, a magic potion, promising a beanstalk to the heavens, yet delivering the same old bed of weeds in the end.

A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night . . .

In a world full of ironies, and with a disease which thrives on the same, I thank my lucky stars, once again, for the affliction that is too tired to tolerate trouble, too wise to mistake a cliff for a curbing, too experienced to imagine that the searing coals are merely colorful twinkle lights.

Love's more comfortable
the second time you fall . . .

And I suppose it's even better the third and the fourth . . . .

Our Brief But Final Courtship

My wife and I had three things in common before we got married--before, in fact, we even knew each other. We went to the same nightclub, we attended the same church, and we frequented the same Starbucks. It might be inferred from the preceding that we also lived in the same neighborhood, so I will not count this as a fourth.

It so happens that our first actual meeting took place at the nightclub, but it could have taken place at any of the three locales, and so we tend to use all three in an interchangeable manner, each being equal to the other in potential, depending upon who is asking, why they want to know, our conceit at the moment, and other variables that may come into play.

My wife says that she came to the bar to order a drink. I was sitting on the other side of the bar with a pint of beer (being otherwise single and friendless). She says that when I looked up from my beer (which I tended to do every twenty minutes or so), my hand froze in midair, pint glass poised just in front of my lips, which had also frozen in a posture of readiness (to drink, that is).

I think this description is perfectly accurate. What I remember is looking up and immediately setting my eyes upon the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. So of course I froze. What man wouldn't? Our eyes met, and she smiled, and she raised her glass from across the bar. (As her story goes, I was still frozen solid during this period of time).

Well, she paid for her drink and disappeared into the crowd (and it was a crowd that night, of the shoulder-to-shoulder sort), and I sat there thinking (able to move, I believe, by that time), My God that was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen!).

Next thing I knew, someone was tapping my left shoulder. Somehow she had come all the way around the bar, squeezed on through behind me, and came to rest on my left. She wanted to know if I could give her a light. Now this is curious, because my wife does not smoke, and even if she had been smoking that night, she could no doubt have gotten a light from one of her friends at her own table.

I proceeded to fish through my pockets for the lighter that was sitting on the bar in front of me. She was still smiling, and I could clearly see, now that she was so close, that she was not as beautiful as I had thought, but more beautiful yet. Stunning, in a word (which was having, indeed, the same paralyzing effect on my mouth as before).

I finally managed to ask where she lived (having discovered, at last, the lighter which had been so completely hidden in plain sight).

At the Marriott, she said.

What, the Marriott Hotel? This seemed rather odd. What kind of girl was this? Perhaps I had not heard correctly. Maybe she had said Maryland, or St. Mary's Convent, or I'm married.

No. A second request for the same information elicited the same response.

The Marriott Hotel.

What sort of girl lives in a hotel? Well let's see, she is Asian, so perhaps she is just passing through, from Singapore to Brazil, for instance. Or how about this--maybe she works at the hotel. And lives there too. Or maybe . . . well, there were other possibilities that entered my mind.

But the long and short of it was that I was now frozen by this question of where she lived--my own fault for asking it, for it had been a stupid question to begin with. Before I knew it she was gone again. I looked around the room but could not find her. I looked around the room the rest of the night, but she had vanished.

I was later to learn that it was none of my business at the time where she might live. Thus her answer, The Marriott. Why would your first words to a woman you don't even know be "Where do you live," she asked. "Why would any woman answer that question coming from a complete stranger?"

Why indeed?

This is where our three places in common ends up being fortuitous, affording, as they did, a three fold opportunity to redeem myself. Our meeting at the nightclub took place in the winter of 2007. We were married in May. A year later, almost to the day, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, though that is a different story altogether.

We no longer have our three places in common, for we no longer go to the nightclub, we rarely go to church anymore, and only I have remained faithful to the neighborhood Starbucks. We have now, therefore, nothing whatsoever in common.

Isn't that what marriage is all about?

We do, however, have two dogs together, in joint ownership. These are our children.

And I can tell you this: I am not about to give them up without a fight.

Language Barrier

A bit more on mean spirited women. In particular, a 5 foot high Indonesian of the aforementioned type. In short (no pun intended), my wife.

It seems that quite aside from the reckless act of entering into marriage of any sort (for by the third time around I should surely have known better), I had also failed to fully appreciate a multitude of peculiar barriers specific to the choice of this particular mate.

First off, she is very much younger than I (24 years younger, to be exact). Young people do not think in the same way as older people. I am not quite sure, frankly, whether they really think, properly speaking, at all.

Secondly, there is the culture barrier, Asian to American. Just look at the troubles we have had in the past. Troubles with Japan, troubles with Vietnam, troubles with Korea. And lets not forget China. Given this troublesome sort of history, what else should I have expected?

Most significant of all barriers, however, is the language barrier. My wife speaks and understands spoken English well enough; yet, when she becomes angry, the basic constructs, the building blocks if you will, of shared intent and comprehension begin to fall onto and over one another, scattering at our feet as if spilled from a child’s toy box. We end up in a mess of garbled delivery and fumbled reception.

One mistake, one failure in clarity, leads to another, and very quickly so. Pretty soon the sky is falling. It’s a given. Everyone knows it. Chicken Little said it was so.

For two days we argued; or rather, we got the actual arguing done with early on, and then simmered in mutual silence, replaying our own versions of what had actually been said—which were both, of course, quite different from what the oft wanted yet never available voice recording would have revealed.

It so happened then that in the middle of the night, I on the sofa, she in our bed, I awoke to a sudden grasp of the essential miscommunication that lay behind the entire kerfuffle. Like a fly in the soup, a bug in the program, it had compromised our discussion at its very core. Poor grammar can be deadly, believe me. Sarcasm, especially, needs an exactitude that may be beyond the person who is speaking English as a second language.

Now I’m not saying, still, that she’s not a mean spirited woman. Because she is. The truth is, we are all pretty mean spirited at heart, all natural men and women, born to the bondage of all the things that are the least honorable in life. It takes an effort to break out. It takes a will, a sacrifice, and sometimes a dream.

I suppose that in conclusion I should mention multiple sclerosis. It is, after all, what this journal is supposed to be largely devoted to. And so I will say that arguing, that fighting, that marital troubles are not good for the person who has multiple sclerosis. Or at least in my own case. I find very quickly that my familiar baseline symptoms begin to grow significantly worse. The pain that is always present in my legs intensifies and spreads, locks itself into my knees, invades by upper thighs and groin; shoulders and neck, already tense, begin to toy with the idea of total paralysis; and my confusion becomes itself confused.

I find quickly enough that I have slipped again toward thinking I’m a normal person—that I can argue and be hateful and insulting and hurtful just as if I were perfectly healthy and able.

It’s not worth the price. It’s not worth risking the consequences. All things must be put in order again, and the whole picture allowed to fill the screen. Nothing, after all, is all that damned important. Nothing but love, and peace, that is.

Mean Spirited Women

My wife is a mean spirited woman. I say it quite dispassionately. My former wives were mean spirited women too, so I’m not really singling her out.

While I was with my first wife, I was still a young man, and so was inclined to be rather mean spirited myself. Back then I fought fire with fire. Things ended up getting burned. Never build your house on a bed of coals.

By the time I married my second wife I had begun to develop a philosophy of compassion and self-sacrifice. It was a philosophy heavily influenced by Jesus Christ. I embraced the notion that love, if shown with patience and as far as possible without condition, would be sufficient to defeat all evils of all sorts. I was wrong. Or perhaps the love itself did succeed, and it was just the marriage that failed.

Two years into the third time around I simply admit to being at a loss. More and more I am persuaded that just getting out and cutting losses would be the most prudent course. But when has the course of love ever been given to taking the course of prudence?

One thing that has always left me dumbfounded is how the women I have known have seemed to believe that they could say the most outrageously unkind things, make the most damning, hateful statements, yet later be able to pretend that it never happened!

I think now of employing the same sort of harshness in a counterattack, and yet I cannot bear the thought, it makes me cringe to imagine it. Why would I want to willfully inflict pain, especially at the cost of my own integrity, and at the cost of our strength and trust together? I don’t know. Why would they? Why do they?

In the end I find myself alone on the battlefield, with only my own pride to face. And I know not what is best anymore—to bury pride, or to embrace it. I have, after all, already tried both, and neither has made so much as a dint in the woman’s steely armor.

I guess the good thing about being older, and having already gone through the mill a few times, is that this sort of stuff is not the end of the world, as it used to seem. It’s just another mile on the road, another day. You begin to see life as a process of a general failure to thrive. You are no longer surprised to find that love is not pure, or often even very loving. What is most precious, and what has been most coveted, even from the earliest day, was a dream all along—and that, at least, has not changed.

Perfection does not reflect itself perfectly, for a splash as occurred in consciousness, way, way back in the beginning. Now there are ripples, now the waters move and are dotted with rain or nudged by the wind. What is the answer but to look up as often as you can remember to, to avert your heart from a world that is in a constant wavering toward chaos, and fix again upon the dream that is eternal?