Herb is off at a consulting gig at the moment - helping John Jay college address Undergraduate Research. And it's going to be 60 degrees outside. Some of the snow may actually melt, though much of it looks like permafrost. I will be at work tomorrow for the second part of what is called "Sketch Problem" and 145 students (who imagine building something that will house their dreams) will be working with a team of low-budget Architects designing a dorm over the highway that cuts through the heart of Boston, supported by columns along a median strip between 8 lanes of traffic. In effect, most of the building, if it is built, will rest on a cushion of air. So that's the work part of the week. But you aren't here to read about work, are you?
I have been obsessing about what my story is in all this. It is clear that Herb is more comfortable with this medium than I. I blush at the idea that you are all reading about us. I am a much more private person -- or so I thought until he tried to convince me that our friends and colleagues have little doubt about who I am. I suppose that's true, but like everything else about this getting married thing, I am discovering new aspects of myself and my partner as we move toward that date. (He hasn't updated it today, but I think it is 128 days away.) So here's what I think my story is...at least for today.
I am marrying a man I have known for 17 years. That's a life time I never expected to have. I expect to be married to him for a generation or two (gods willing and the proverbial 'crik don't rise').
I am marrying him at a time when lives and governments change in a blink of an eye, and it is hard to believe that there is anything that will be forever. There's too much evidence to the contrary. But the reality is that every day that we spend together is better than the days spent apart. Every day spent together is built on laughter and shared meal making (yes, we still sit next to each other on the couch each night to have our rather ersatz meals, made too often with take-out from Whole Foods). Every day spent together is built on the daily rituals and routines that I never thought I'd share. (And yes he refills the ice cube trays and likes the toilet paper to come from the top of the roll). And every day, he drops me off at work while he goes to park the car (I am always carrying the computer and a thermos of coffee and bags of papers, just as my mother and father did decades ago). And we walk together to get the car from the garage and repark it on the street (just as my father did). And whatever comes, he will sit in the office at home and I somewhere soft, and every day will be built on knowing what the things that hurt are and the things that help soothe a difficult day or a sense of loss or a sense that the world is not, for most of us, a just place. And most days, we will wake too early, so that we can again start the work day that went on too long the night before. Or on long luxuriant weekends, we will wake with word games: "Plethora" "Pink" "Plink" "Plunk" "Sequlae" "Squamish" "Skunk."
Somehow I think that we too are building our dreams over a highway on a cushion of air.
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