Anniversary

No Method, Just Madness, and Great Good Fortune

Sam and I are in North Carolina today, our 45th anniversary. We are visiting our daughter Rachael and her husband Will, who are expecting their first baby in November. We are staying in the sweet little place we bought a few years back in the progressive touchy-feeling enclave of Carrboro, outside Chapel Hill.

So many things bumping together on this anniversary day, rain clouds and memories, trying to figure out why the hell the air conditioning isn’t working. Even though it’s pouring I plan to run, just as soon as I finish my coffee.

Run, coffee, marriage. Constants.

Yesterday, we flew for the first time since the pandemic, and it was wacky, to be honest, the crazy people in the airport and on both flights, the way we all seem to have forgotten how to be normal in public. Everyone is a mix of restraint and impulse, setting fires and putting them out. We try to contain ourselves.

It occurs to me that 45 years of marriage has provided a sustained model of this dynamic. We have entered/enter still into everything not knowing, not really, but hoping, and often, we are disappointed; but sometimes, we are incapable of even beginning to wrap our heads around the wonder of it. This shaking, as Roethke famously observed, keeps us steady. You enter into the contract on faith. No guarantee, just let go and hang on, repeat, on loop. At the end of the day, every day, all days, if you are, like us, insanely fortunate, is this astonishment of a life.