Here’s the first event of the Digital Potlatch, a selected GRACK! column written on the day of my wedding anniversary in ’06. If you’ve never read any of these before (and I expect most of you haven’t), you need to know that “grack” is my approximation of a typical raven call. In fact, in the old days, I had a recording of one that played automatically when the page loaded! And aren’t you lucky, I’ve made it optional for the moment, while preserving the general formatting of these past Web columns to the best of my ability, including the original images. As these accumulate, you’ll be able to read them all in the category archive. For now, enjoy! Oh, yes, the raven call:
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Twenty-Five Years
It all started with the toes.
I was an adult student taking a music theory class. She was teaching, sitting on the edge of a table at the front of the room, her legs hanging down. It was a warm, humid early spring day and the windows were wide open. Her sandals didn’t quite reach the floor, and I watched her toes stretch and curl every which way as she talked. Unconsciously arousing on her part then, from this vantage point now, it was like watching tadpoles darting plump and shiny at the edge of a sunlit pond.
Our first official date was a walk along the deserted, bluff-side banks of the Sassafrass River, a private place we’d revisit later for skinny-dipping. I was totally in love. The backs of her thighs were impossibly smooth and glowed like peaches. Up and down the sandy shore we strolled, then back to her Volkswagen bug. She sat on my lap and kissed me before we headed back to town, no time or nerve between us yet for anything else. That came soon enough, but later, and the second time was in the bathtub.
As for the “25 years,” I remember when she phoned home to say that she was moving in with me and momma cried, so it’s really been longer than that. But that’s how long we’ve been married.
As if moving in together wasn’t exciting enough, my landlord lent his blessing by sending his handyman to the former optometrist’s office I was renting for an apartment, where the two of them knocked down most of the inside walls. (They even built a second closet.) We might have kept her much nicer space instead, except there wasn’t any outdoor room for Lady the Wonder Dog. My place was adjacent to what amounted to a private park and had a woodstove, which seems to be a theme.
A year or two later (?) we drove that same VW bug all the way to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, by way of Des Moines and central Kansas. We had the motor overhauled in Iowa and headed to Manhattan for a choral seminar. An apocalyptic prairie thunderstorm sent us to a motel instead of back to where we’d camped beside a lake. The next morning, we found that someone had stolen our tent and gear. After driving around for hours, we found most of it, except for my favorite yellow cowboy shirt (of course). The next day we took off for Austin and afterwards to Mexico.
We hardly knew a word of Spanish. My parents were renting a house in San Miguel and we’d be visiting for at least a month. I couldn’t believe Mexico. On the highways, people drove like I’d always wanted to. Everyone we met was was warm and friendly. We looked for mummies in Guanajuato and bought a carved stone fish from a roadside vendor in the mountains of Michoacan (yes, she still has it). Hitting the narrow cobblestone streets of San Miguel with its beggars by the cathedral was like dropping into the the Middle Ages. Years later I learned about Neil Cassady dying of exposure counting the railroad ties between there and Nuevo Laredo and could scarcely believe we’d been there too.
In January, ’81 we walked to the courthouse and got married in front of all our friends. After too much champagne at a rowdy party at our place, we drove through sudden heavy snow out to a country house where our landlord’s wife would make us dinner. The old Saab lost traction as I turned left a bit too hard, but we weren’t going very fast. In the slowest of slow motion, it gracefully rotated a full 360 degrees in front of oncoming traffic and miraculously straightened out, just in time.
A couple of years later we spent nine weeks in Europe on the cheap — try that now and see how far you get. The first leg took us from London to Amsterdam, then down to Zurich and Vienna. We had a borrowed apartment there, and directions to a restaurant for locals only. The scale of the imperial city on the edge of the steppes was stupefying, but we retraced walks that Beethoven might have made, walking home through darkened, empty streets. After that we went to Venice, Sicily, and back up to Florence, where we spent a week. We also went to Nice and stayed some days in Paris, then headed back to London. What a rich and glorious ride. (Before we did all this, we’d moved all our possessions into my grandmother’s garage, counting on relocating to a house we’d never seen — when we got back, the whole thing fell apart and we were homeless for a while. Less than a year later when we moved out to the country, our mattress flew off the top of a friend’s truck and landed in a marsh…)
These are just some things from long ago, a fraction of all the adventures I can’t begin to count. Each one opens like a universe all its own, connected to the others by the deep, mysterious current of our lives. It’s all a rush and rumble and it isn’t over yet. For all I know, it never ends, and maybe that’s the secret. Not the things we own or the places that we’ve been, but something else entirely.
The tadpoles scurry in the shallows, their tiny undulating tails stirring miniature clouds of mud. This morning, then, I surprised her in her bathrobe at the door–
(Roses have a way of doing that.)
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