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Twenty-Two Years Of ZZ Marriage

October 14, 2012 12 Comments


Circumstances used to demand the ZZ marriage from everybody. You couldn’t run around assembling and disassembling your affairs all over the landscape over and over. You placed your bets and you took your chances and you stuck to it. Sometimes the chances were pretty slim. You always stayed until closing even if your chips were gone in the first five minutes.

I’ve got a ZZ marriage. It is not required any more. No one would much bat an eye socially or otherwise if we parted. There is no disapprobation, even on purely practical grounds, to keep us together.

I do not understand my wife, and have no desire to. I am not a vivisectionist of her personality. The patient always dies in that situation, after all. I am not explaining my situation here; I am simply observing it. I can tell you that I have an enormously defective personality, and she don’t seem to care. I don’t know why that is, either.

Poor people, dumb people, sick people, interesting or dull people, all sorts of people, no matter how straitened their circumstances, no matter how hard-hammered by life they were, got a chance to do something sublime in their life. For many, it is the only really transcendent thing they will ever be allowed to attempt; opportunities to win a Congressional Medal of Honor or a Pulitzer Prize or something aren’t just lying around, never mind the actual article.

I’ve had an interesting life so far, I guess. It’s not over yet. I could tell you wild tales, many of them true. Nothing compares to my ZZ marriage. It’s made all the more piquant by the fact that no one is making us do it.

Moveable Feast

May 8, 2011 4 Comments


Will you thumb through the pictures when I am gone?

Will my face, made careworn and tired, be restored in your mind’s eye? I cannot know what it was you ever saw in me. I cannot understand how you could know that when I said those things all people say to one another, almost without thinking, that I would really mean them. I said it and only half believed it myself, uttering such extravagant pledges of dubious value. Not for want of them being true. But I am unreliable.

There is nothing in this world but to love, and be loved in return. In a hundred years the most important man you ever met is anonymous. In a thousand everyone is. We cobbled together a life around the table where we break the bread, and for a few thousand times we were as one. I saw your face in our children’s faces. You said you saw mine. The universe passed the plate, and we put in our offering. We are poor, but it’s enough for anyone to give. No man could do more. No man could ask for more.

I remember when I was lying on the bed like a dead thing, and you came into the room and thought I was asleep. I wasn’t asleep; I was gone from sight, and sound, and lost in a fever. I lay there in a puddle of sweat and more; my very life coming out of every pore, leaving nothing but a husk where a man used to be.

And you kissed me. I remember.

Tag: Mrs. Cottage

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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