The Perfect Thing

I live in an old house with drafty windows, not enough outlets, and no square corners at all. It has lots of character though. And it has some really, really beautiful features that made us fall in love with the house, including a lovely old front door that's made of panes of beveled glass framed in dark oak. So it's a little hard to explain why we had the door covered, for years, with a nondescript curtain. (It came with the house. See what I mean? Embarrassing.)

Anyway, we'd always meant to replace the unappealing curtain. We only needed to decide what we wanted instead.

And then, one day, figuring that we only lacked the proper motivation, I got rid of the curtain. I've seen this sort of thing before, where as long as you have something good enough, even when it's not actually all that good, like an old sofa from the thrift store, you will have it forever. I suppose that would be a good moral for a story on sustainability, or reduce, reuse and recycle, which is not what this story is about.

So anyway, we were left with a wonderful view of our lovely, beveled glass front door, and absolutely no privacy. And it worked. We were motivated.

One day while my husband and I were out having lunch together, I pointed out the pretty pane of framed stained glass hanging in the restaurant window. "That's what I want for our front door," I told him. "It doesn't cover the whole window, but it covers most of it. And it's pretty. That would work."

He pointed out the obvious - that with glass clanking against glass every time we open and close the door, something is going to break.

I pointed out the obvious - that I'm not quite that stupid. Of course I didn't mean actual stained glass. Just something like that. A wall hanging made of cloth, maybe.

OK. That made sense. We agreed.

Time passed, and we kept our eyes open for the perfect thing, while carefully not walking around half naked in the vicinity of our front door, or at least I did. It's possible my husband forgot. I mean about the perfect thing, not about not walking around in our underwear. Mostly.

One day we were having lunch together again in that same restaurant. (It's a really great restaurant.) And I pointed to the stained glass and said again that I wanted something like that for our front door.

And once again my husband said, "But not stained glass, because that would break."

And once again I agreed.

And so we went to an art fair, which was the perfect opportunity to look for the perfect thing for our front door - the stained glass-like thing that wasn't stained glass - that would restore our modest standing with our neighbors and finally replace the unattractive curtain.

And we found it.

And what do you suppose we found? Do you have to ask? We found stained glass, of course. It was beautiful, and it was perfect. Except for, oh yeah, the whole being stained glass thing.

We rolled our eyes at ourselves, and then we walked away. We thought that maybe if we kept looking we'd find something else, something perfect that wasn't made of stained glass. Maybe we would return and find we'd changed our minds, and the stained glass thing wasn't really perfect after all. With luck, we would return and find that it had been sold to someone else. But instead, we returned, and it was still there, and it was still perfect. And we bought it, and we hung it, and it's perfect.

It turns out that you can put little silicone bumpers on the corners, so the clanking isn't too bad. And you can be kind of gentle when you open and close the door. And you can remind yourself of the intrinsically transitory nature of beautiful things made of glass, like doors, and stained glass, and such. And you can share a little laugh with your husband over human foibles and the blessing of frivolous problems.

Red Shoes

I bought a pair of high heeled shoes the other day – tomato red and spiky. They're really great shoes. Very sexy.

If this were a romance novel, my husband would take one look at me in those shoes, throw me over his shoulder, and search out the nearest flat surface.

Sigh.

The reality is that my husband is great at rocking my world, but it doesn't have anything to do with sexy shoes. At least not so far. And frankly, if things like slutty shoes were important to him, he should have married someone else, someone who wouldn't have waited this long to get around to buying some.

So, I've been trying to imagine how he'll react when he gets a look at these amazing shoes. He may go all Neanderthal, but I kind of doubt it. I can't help but think he's more likely to get very, very tense, the same kind of tense that men get when their wives ask them if these pants make me look fat, only probably a little worse, because he will have no prior experience to guide him. Face it, the right answer is "no" or even "NO!" And any man who has ever had even a little time to think about it knows that, or at least he'll know it the second time he's asked.
 
But here's a situation my husband's unlikely to have anticipated, and where he has no prior experience to guide him. A little marital landmine. It almost makes me feel a bit sorry for him.

In fact, I bought the shoes for an event that won't take place for another month, so it's quite possible that my husband's first glimpse of them will be on the Visa bill. I have to think that right off the bat he'll have the wrong reaction, even though that first glimpse will probably set his heart to racing.

When he does see the shoes, on me, he will probably appreciate that my legs look great. But it's not like this is the first time he's ever seen me. We've been together for twenty odd years. He's seen me looking great before. He's also seen me cleaning the garage. He's seen me puttering around the kitchen in sweats. He's seen me with some seriously scary bed head. He's seen me with the stomach flu.

He has seen me delivering a baby.

Obviously I'm lucky that there's more to our mutual attraction than the visual. I heard from one man (for the record – someone else's husband, not mine) that seeing a baby get delivered looks a lot like seeing a deer get gutted. Can one pair of red shoes really counteract a visual like that?

And of course my husband knows me. He knows I don't often wear impractical shoes. He'll probably be wondering how the heck I'll be able to stand in them all night long. He may worry that I'm going to sprain an ankle or dislocate a hip, and it won't only be because he knows he'll be the one who has to lug the groceries in from the car while I'm recuperating. It will also be because, you know, he loves me.

To compound the problem, he'll probably have to let me into his office to change out of my sneakers before the event, because the heels on these shoes are so high and spiky that I couldn't possibly wear them to drive the car, much less to walk across a parking lot of any size.

And it won't help matters that I didn't buy them to go on a hot date. I bought the shoes to match an outfit I'm wearing to an event where we'll be playing host and hostess, standing around making small talk, drinking wine from plastic cups and listening to speeches. By the end of the night my feet will be aching, and I'll be dying to get home, take off the shoes and hurl them into the back of the closet.

It'll be totally worth it though. They're really great shoes. Just ask my husband.
 

A Good Marriage

I spent the day with my dad on Saturday. It was nice - we spent enough hours together that we got past the "headline news" style of talking, and actually connected in a way that we've been too busy to do for too long.

And here's one of the interesting things we talked about.

He told me a little anecdote about a time recently when he and my mom were watching the news together. In one of the stories, they interviewed an older wife who said something like, "My husband wanted to talk to me about something. He had such a serious look on his face that my first thought was that he was going to tell me he was leaving me, or that one of us had cancer."

In fact, the husband was going to tell the wife something about a third person, whom this story was about. But that's not why my dad was telling me the story. It was my mom's reaction.

She turned to my dad and said something like, "You know, if you wanted to talk to me about something serious, it wouldn't be my first reaction that you were going to leave me."

It took me a minute to process what my dad was saying, and why he was saying it. And then I got it. That little statement of my mom's was a pretty amazing tribute to the strength of their marriage.

It made me reflect on how lucky I am. As individuals, my parents are both terrific, and I'm lucky to have them. But I've also been lucky to have been a child of that marriage. I have no doubt at all that my marriage is as successful as it is because there are so many ways of being successfully married that are second nature to me, from having lived in a home with a successful marriage. And it doesn't hurt any that my husband's parents have logged more than 50 years too.

I'm not saying that their marriage was always happy. I'm not saying mine is either. But it sure is healthy, and strong, and terrific. Way to go, Mom and Dad! And thanks.

Soul Mates

I just finished reading a good book - Knit in Comfort, by Isabel Sharpe (my new favorite author) - in which there's a group of women who get together periodically to knit. One character always shakes up the group by asking a very personal question that everyone has to answer.

In real life, that character is my friend Holly. Whenever a group of our co-workers get together, she will interrupt the ordinary chitchat at some point, and ask a provocative question. Once it was to share the most useful advice someone gave you before you married. Once it was to tell about a woman in your life who was an important role model and why.

I am lousy at these kinds of questions, and generally wait until close to the end, to give myself time to think of a reasonable answer. But in the meantime, there are funny answers, and poignant answers, and we all wind up being terribly moved, sometimes even teary, and feeling closer to one another by the time we're done. The questions are simple, on the face of it.  But they draw the conversations into new territory, thoughtful territory.  These wind up being the best get-togethers. (Although there is one woman who stopped coming to these parties, because she just hates being put on the spot that way. So there's the down side.)

But it doesn't always work. I just heard this story from my friend Kathy, who came back from a weekend up north. She was sitting around a campfire with her husband and kids and the extended family of some friends of theirs, when an older aunt asked everyone whether they're married to their soulmates. And all those poor souls had to go around the circle, in front of their spouses and kids, and answer the question.

Kathy said that one of the most common answers was "sometimes," which is as close to a safe answer as that question will let you get. That's what her husband answered. Kathy managed to get out of answering at all, which is a skill I would like to learn from her. But then she thought about it more that night and came up with her answer. She said that her husband is like her right arm. Most of the time she doesn't give it much thought at all, although when she thinks about it, she knows it's important. But if she were ever to lose it, she would miss it just terribly.

After close to 20 years of marriage, that's really not a bad way to think of your husband.

Day Count: 11

A Romantic Story or Cow, Marriage, Priorities

I heard a good story recently. My friend was telling me about her son Paul, a struggling farmer. When he was young and just starting out, he was seriously dating a girl. After some time, things had proceeded to the point where she was hoping for a ring at Christmas. Instead, Paul spent his money on a tractor. His girlfriend dumped him. She later married and had children, and is living happily ever after as far as anyone knows. Paul, meanwhile, had a good decade of regretting what he'd done. In all that time he dated only sporadically, and had no serious prospects. And it looks as if he learned something from that long ago mistake.

Recently, a wonderful young woman showed up in his life. In short order they became inseparable, and decided to get married. They're scrimping and saving for the wedding, which is coming up in a couple of months. Then a close relative of hers passed away unexpectedly. She was really rocked by the death. She wanted to go to the funeral, but the plane ticket was exorbitant, and they're scrimping and saving for their wedding. But Paul realized how important it was for her to go to the funeral. Without even telling her, he sold one of his cows. Then he told her to go ahead and get her ticket, because they had the money for it.

Looks like he got his priorities straight now.