Sparky

Shabbat morning at the Embassy Suites in La Jolla. This is the first time that the four of us have traveled together in over a year. The boys fell asleep on top of each other and Himself was forced for most of the journey to wear the wife cancellers while I continued my psycho narrow musical worship. Chowpatty bestowed upon me an uncorrected proof of The Replacements, All Over But the Shouting, an oral history, edited by Jim Walsh which I am consuming, while himself consumes Babylon‘s Burning, from Punk to Grunge by Clinton Heylin. Nevertheless, the Westerberg mixed with Yo La Tengo drove my beloved away from me and to the wife cancellers. We took off in a hurry for this last fling of a summer that has changed us all. Usually, himself painstakingly programs music that will be agreeable to the four of us for long car expeditions and we all also neglected to pack sufficient clothing and my sweater is not warm enough and has a tiny moth hole in the shoulder.

My husband writes passionately to me. This week, it turned out we were writing to each other in exact moments of real time and the results of this made me gasp out loud. I should have a pithy parcel of Proust to illustrate the reaction I had to reading the letter that was written while I was writing a letter but the most precise comparison I can summon (although it so diminishes the man to whom I am consecrated) is Harry Potter channeling Voldemort. My husband writes to me so tenderly and exquisitely and notes wistfully our current baleful existence in dusty detritus, so dispiriting we are forced to flee to corporate hotel chain where Himself and I enjoy complimentary ale and Bloody Mary respectively, in plastic cups, while our children scarf Shirley Temples and Goldfish crackers.

Himself and I do not drive well together. I can lord over him many more years of driving experience but we disagree on the handling of the automobile among other things. My reliance on Mapquest irks him enormously and yesterday the directions to the Westminster Bahn Mi joint (where they turned out to be quite mean) were plain wrong and this set off the usual tension filled experience that is my beloved and I in the same car. We did hold hands a bit, my music droning, the wife canceller’s jacking off his eardrums, but there were the usual snaky moments due to the failed Mapquests and the heavy traffic. While my beloved and I have conquered huge demons towards wrapping our souls together, I see the automobile as an almost unforeseeable milieu of co-existence, unless one of us makes a whole bunch of money and we can hire a driver.

While I hold only slight hope for the driving component of our power struggle toward perfection, I dislike it when he walks ahead of me or leaves a restaurant while I am still seated at the table. He sees these concerns as ridiculous. We saw in a La Jolla art store a huge oil portrait combining the faces of Mother Teresa, Che Guevarra,, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Gates, and Gandhi. Within the scope of the possibility of human endeavor, it is indeed ridiculous that I expect my husband to waste brain power to observe these arcane customs. Tough shit.

My husband is generous with his passion for me and asks me to be generous in mine for him. He loves and trusts me and expresses this to me and asks for me to express it in return, but I am small. I see the crescent and my beloved sees the whole of the moon. Our souls are one, immaculate and I still want to be shepherded and protected in the physical realm. We are strong and formidable partners and the aggressive expression of this in every pocket of the universe nurtures our hearts and souls. I lie beside my husband naked and trusting in the night. He finds it hard to correlate this openness and trust with my need for him to observe what he sees as outmoded conventions. I am not diminished though when my husband pulls out my chair or opens a door. I am tough and I fight back and use lots of dirty language but I find being treated like a lady (and I could barf for typing those words, but it’s true) makes me feel safe and trusting and loved.

After a rather mediocre dinner in a popular La Jolla (think Pasadena on the beach) restaurant we ran into Sparky, and his wheelchair. I got into a conversation with Sparky’s owner and it turned out we both knew the great rescuer of woebegone terriers, Ruth Millington . Our beloved Airedale,, Andrew, came from Ruth and Scott and Julia have adopted a number of Ruth’s pups, recently the most excellent duo of Nick and Nora. I thought my husband , kennel boy and lover of terriers, would be enchanted by a worshipper of Ruth and of course noble Sparky and his little wheelchair but he just patted Sparky dutifully on the head and disappeared, I guess to gaze mindlessly into the prosperous seaside community’s storefronts.

I mentioned to my husband that I didn’t want him to walk ahead of me and I thought I said it tenderly but we slept badly, both wounded. We have since made things right and I added to the right-making my disappointment at his antisocialness with Sparky and his mistress and he told me he couldn’t bear to watch the poor little dog in his pathetic contraption. Oh we are smart and not without our charms but oh, how frail we both are. A woman who cannot bear her man’s quicker pace and a man who us undone by even the suggestion of a doggy who suffers. May we always leave the table together and walk side by side.