Ten Years Is Almost A Third of My Life (Or Something, Anyway It Seems Like A Lot)

MEMORY LANE

Well, yesterday marked our official ten year anniversary. I’m not usually much of one for making a big deal out of anniversaries–and you know those couples that, like, celebrate their six month anniversary and stuff? Reminds me of the Onion article about the nation gearing up for the one year anniversary of two weeks after September 11th–but ten seems like a cool moment to reflect and take funny pictures.

‘Twas ten years ago that my old man, then a young man but still called an old man, hopped atop a jet airliner with all his worldly belongings and popped across our great nation and into the arms of me, to whom at that time he referred to as his “robot girlfriend” due to the online nature of our relationship up to that point. Later famously declaring “you are not a white text box” and then refusing to ever email me again (or read my blog, ahem), my old man is neither wishy-washy nor weak-willed nor lily-livered. When he left his home and his family he was no more than a boy in the company of strangers, in the quiet of a railway station, running scared.

My heart was pounding as I drove to the airport. What would it be like? All we’d done is talk on the phone for hours and made out once in Rob’s van, even though I had a wicked cold sore and he was just recovering from facial reconstruction surgery. Was that really enough of a foundation for moving across the country to be together? It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t seem that weird when you’re young, though. Why not move across the country for no real reason? Might as well. This was his attitude. He gave up a long-sought-after job at a research base in Antarctica so he could move to Portland and see about dating me. I’ll never forget that.

Everybody says they knew immediately that somebody was THE ONE for them, and I feel like I did too, but I just didn’t say it or think it for awhile because it seemed corny and also like jinxing. It was just eerie, how every step of the way he did everything right. He said all the right things. He reacted to turmoil and hardship in a way that made me feel safe and confident. He wasn’t jealous or possessive. He wasn’t mean, and this helped me overcome my own mean streak. He listened and responded thoughtfully in conflicts. He actually seemed to BELIEVE the thing everybody says but never acts on, when they say “I just want her to be happy.” He didn’t lie, not ever. He kept things in a very pragmatic, realistic, solution-oriented realm and yet he was one of the most romantic people I’d ever met, fond of grand outrageous gestures and eloquent in describing his passions. How could a person be so pragmatic and yet also so cinematically romantic? If you find a person like this, SNAP HIM UP.

He was standing outside at Departures, just as I’d told him to do. He had two suitcases, a guitar, and a skateboard. He was beardy and grubby in that early-20s way where you’ve been wearing the same jacket every day for 3 years. He had braces on his teeth and his face was still numb and confusing from his surgery. I was wearing a purple tank top with a fluorescent lion jumping through a flaming hoop, and the awesome velcro sneakers I got on tour in Toronto. I got out of the car, my hands shaking, and walked toward him, and he picked me up and squeezed me hard, one of the great moments of my life.

He moved into our friend’s basement down the street from my house, and slept in a tent because of bugs and also just to be weird. We talked about it yesterday and neither of us can really remember anything we did back then. Went for walks, ate burritos, went to Steve’s house. I was working part time editing photos for my friend’s business. The old man had a series of temp jobs, most notably that job canceling people’s phone service at AT&T where the lady sat behind him whisper-singing christian songs all day.

We had our first fight a few months in. It was about whether Jake LaMotta, from “Raging Bull,” was a sympathetic character or not. I, still wrestling with that first phase of feminist awakening where you can brook no subtlety or nuance in your judgments, said no, because he mistreated women. The old man said yes, he was a tragic, tragic character. We yelled and yelled! I have since come around to his position, obviously. One fun part of a long relationship is how you gradually take on each other’s beliefs over time. For years he insisted that Raising Arizona wasn’t that good a movie. Now he says he never said that. I WON

He’s the reason I finally applied to grad school after six years of saying I would do it someday. He showed up at my house suddenly and said “lets move to California” and I said “ok.” He had this idea that we would “get on the path toward a truer version of ourselves” and I think he was right. I think I was meant to be an academic, or at least it just feels very good to me, in spite of everything, in spite of this awful neoliberal cultural moment I’m trapped in. We moved to Santa Cruz with no jobs and no place to live, and it worked out somehow. We lived a block from the ocean and could hear the sea lions barking from our bedroom. Steve visited us. Everybody came by on tour. We were never bored. We didn’t have any furniture and we fought about cooking and every weekend we walked for miles along the cliffs and it was great.

Then he went one place and I went another, and we were apart for three years. It was hard but also fine, because of the aforementioned qualities of this person. If you know somebody loves you and would never lie and these two things are never even vaguely up for debate, you can do anything. I moved to LA and got giardia and lived in a basement and cried reading Kant and smoked weed and watched Blue Planet DVDs on mute while blasting my “yoga drums” CD. He moved to Berkeley and lived in a basement and ate burritos every day and wrote a thesis about “Mac n’ Me.”

Then he moved to Iowa and it was harder. His first year of grad school; me taking comps and generally freaking out. Trying to get funding so I could go be with him again. He lived in a horrific undergrad cesspool apartment where people took shits on the stairs and barfed in the entryway and he had to lie awake in bed listening to drunk 19 year olds brawl in the street and scream “ASHLEY OPEN THE DOOR I LOVE YOU” at three in the morning. He got really into theory and it took me basically five years to even begin comprehending what he was talking about half the time. Our scholarly and intellectual pursuits diverged dramatically and yet the common ground of our shared interests also grew and grew and hasn’t stopped growing, and ultimately each of us is developing a profile enormously influenced by the other. He asks me if stuff is in sonata form and I ask him to explain Marxism. I proofread his Wagner paragraph and he helps me develop a more pointed argument. At night he does the dishes while I read New Yorker articles to him.

I got my funding and mailed all my belongings to the apartment he’d picked out for us to live in together, and hopped on a plane, and this time it was me flying across the country to go be with him. To honor the occasion my mom gave me a book about this couple who lives in Alaska and kayaks all over the ocean and one time they saw a 500 year old whale carcass frozen on the side of a cliff. I read that on the plane and when I landed it was a new life.

Iowa was hot and hatefully muggy and then so cold I couldn’t believe it even though I’d grown up at 9,000 feet in the San Juan mountains of Colorado. So cold your lettuce froze solid on your five minute walk home. So cold you had to have two scarves and gloves underneath your mittens and some kind of Russian mountaineering hat with fur ear flaps and the sorority girls would yell rude things at you when you walked by. There were tornado warnings constantly and once I even heard one, rumbling, it really does sound like a freight train, now I understand what that means. Our housemate in the basement yelling on the phone to his grandfather; Richard carting his kittens down there in a box; me standing out in the yard like an idiot, pointing and saying “WOW”

We decided to get married, ostensibly for health insurance purposes but in reality because we are square traditionalists at heart and the idea of making heavy promises in front of all our loved ones felt really important to us. I knew I would marry him almost from the very first and when it was finally time it was obvious. We got married in Portland and all our friends helped so much and it was like constant tears, watching my dad and uncle string lights my dad’s friend brought all the way from Mexico for the occasion; knowing that my mom got up at 5 in the morning to get the best flowers at the farmers’ market; Steve taking me to get fake boobs at the MLK Fashion Plaza and running so many other weird errands with such an attitude of calm; Mike’s incredible speech; all our friends making so much amazing food; Jac’s insane wedding cake with the shark coming out of the top. The old man’s vows were much better than mine, but now all I can remember is this wonderful line: “I promise to give you room to change, and the license to stay the same.” We went up on the roof and cried and cried while Sarah took pictures and the sun set. In the morning we flew to France for the secret surprise honeymoon the old man had planned without telling me. To the medieval village where the guy I wrote my dissertation about grew up. More tears! All I got him was a 16mm film projector that didn’t even work.

Back to Iowa. I finished my dissertation and spent a week learning tarot cards. I got my PhD. The old man got his Master’s. We drank so much at the two bars in town where undergrads don’t go. We watched movies. We read. We walked. He programmed a festival; I got into sacred harp singing. We went to the Pizza Ranch. Long lazy hot-ass summers, going to the lake, walking in the woods, popping down to Chicago for the Hollis Frampton retrospective, officially the boringest thing I have ever done in my life.

One day we said, why have we been talking about getting a snoopy for so long? What’s stopping us? We have a nice place to live and all the time in the world. Lets go. We borrowed Richard’s car and drove out to the pound and said “we want your laziest dog” and they brought out this wee little man, hesitant, sniffing, hanging back when his loud brothers were offered treats. We took him into the field and tried to throw the ball for him but all he wanted to do was lie down in the sun and get a belly rub. This is the snoopy for us, we said. We filled out the paperwork and bought $50 of dog books and freaked out and brought him home and sat and stared at him for what felt like weeks. He grew and grew and learned and then he was allowed on the couch and then he didn’t need his crate anymore and now he is just a man who lives with us, stinking up the joint and barking at the mailman.

The old man successfully comped and with me on the job market, we moved back to Portland, snoopy very confused in the U-Haul but getting up when we drove alongside the Columbia river, I swear he could smell it. We pulled up in front of our little house and our friends were there waiting for us and my heart felt like it would burst. Steve helped us move all our boxes in and we drank champagne in the yard, me still in a splint from my heinous arm injury a few months earlier.

Still talking, always talking. Discussing what we want and what we should shoot for. Simultaneously realizing, independently of one another, that we don’t want to have children. This revelatory conversation making me feel closer to him than I ever had before, how can it be? We decided it will just be us, working on this project of living and dying, trying to put money where mouth is, probably failing a lot, but always trying to bring intellectual positions and lived life closer together. Surprisingly hard. Me secretly thinking maybe we’ll adopt a foster child later in life, just like the snoopy, give an existing person the help it needs, the love and support it needs to try to make it through this crazy life. Gonna spring that one on him at some point.

A relationship is a project. A project you work on together, that is fun and rewarding to work on. You take time out of your day to work on it and talk about it. How is the project doing? Is there anything that needs tinkering with? Or sometimes you just take a break to talk about how much you enjoy the project and how much pleasure the project brings you. I like thinking about it this way. Like there are two individuals with their own stuff going on, but then they make something additional between them, collaboratively.

Yesterday to celebrate we went back to the airport and got jamba juice. We took a picture, us standing right where we hugged ten years ago. Bodies are older and starting to sag; his hair is silvering; glasses are thicker; I finally got a cavity goddamn it. We take multi-vitamins and worry about protein and he just got his first gym membership. It is always strange when you revisit your old self at a specific moment. I felt like we were waving to ourselves, our younger selves, at that spot outside the airport, which, if you are starting to believe time isn’t actually linear, like I am, means that we kind of literally were there, already, ten years ago, looking at ourselves and smiling benevolently. Oh you two, we said.

Thank you for listening to my mushy thoughts. In other news, last night we watched the first episode of “Mr. Belvedere” because we both believed the premise of that show to be that a judge sentenced a jewel thief to be a middle class family’s butler, and that the final episode revealed the entire series to have been a dream. Turns out, obviously, this is not true, but now we can’t figure out why we both thought it! Does anyone know? I think it is from a comedy sketch or Comedy Bang Bang episode or something but I need HARD FACTS.

Up next: My thoughts on Stefan Zweig’s biography of Marie Antoinette!