Ode to Husband

Some of my favorite writers have sadly lost their spouses, and as writers, part of their grieving process involves writing a memoir of losing their spouse. I have nothing against this whatsoever, and actually love these memoirs. I love histories of marriages (of good marriages I should stipulate having seen enough bad ones in my life). So I generally pick these stories up - Joyce Carol Oates's recent piece in The New Yorker on becoming a widow and the last week of her marriage, to Calvin Trillion's About Alice or Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Must You Go? by Antonia Fraser is the next one on my list (I hear it's one of those books that you don't want to end) as Fraser tells the story of her life with Harold Pinter.
      With the death of one of my uncles and my step-dad within the space of a year, and then the death of another favorite uncle a month ago, I've been thinking about the stories that get created and told within marriages, the kind of stories that end up as family legends and myths, as well as the stories that don't get told - or not until both respective parties are dead in some cases. After reading Oates's piece in the New Yorker, followed by the article in the New York Times on civil unions replacing marriage in France, I started wondering who cares what we call it? Whatever it is, it's sharing a life with someone, and whether it's marriage, being civilly united, or sinful as some conservative consider it (not that it's any of their business), it is significant. I decided it's significant enough that I might not wait for my husband to die before I started commemorating my life with him. I might start celebrating those moments I share with him, when I fall in more love with him, when he surprises me, when he makes me laugh, even when he flips out in asshole mode, storms out of the room slamming the door behind him only to walk back in two seconds later with an apology (well, I don't know if I have to share all those...).
      When I met my husband, he wasn't funny and I considered it too bad. While we were dating, I'd have those moments when I think, we get along great, I love being with him, but he's not funny. Then somewhere along the way, he got funny. He even got funny in that way that sometimes can be inappropriate, in that way that points out a truth that people know or do, but don't necessarily admit.

       We went out yesterday, while the snow was still pretty and ignoring all blizzard warnings about how we should stay inside, or rather, we were heeding the warnings as we were going out to stock up on groceries while we still had the use of a car. Then we decided to drive around a neighborhood or two to help our brainstorm about where we want to live, we stumbled past Grimaldi's Pizza which is notorious for its line down the block and there was no line. We weren't that hungry, but we stopped and ate anyway simply because there was no wait. Then as we drove home (or where we're staying for now) we saw the decreasing visibility, and the beginning of the blizzard. On the radio, we listened to the news, which interrupted the weather warnings to share the story of the Pope's Christmas message and how he condemned the Christmas Day violence in Nigeria and the Philippines. The Pope called the violence "absurd." I asked, is there a kind of violence that is not absurd?
      The Pope then called for an end to senseless violence and declared that today, Christians are the most persecuted group on the planet. Somewhere along the line, my husband picked up a dry sense of sarcastic humor.
     "Well, you know, what goes around..." He said. "You notice he didn't mention the Spanish Inquisition. Or that they KILLED SOUTH AMERICA."

My husband didn't used to say things like this.  But now that he does, I love it. It cracks me up.