A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at December 31st, 2007

    My husband sings happy birthday to the horses on New Year’s Eve.  There are a dozen so this is a commitment of time.  I did not know he did this until this morning when I was reading to him the NY Times Editorial about the passage of time and how New Year’s is the official birthday of all horses.  I believe I will still remember the actual dates of the births I have experienced because it is so stunning and unforgettable to stand there and watch a ten-minute old, gangly creature that already shows a winsome and gentle beauty struggle to stand, achieve balance and begin to nuzzle an exhausted yet watchful mother.  Still, I understand Jim’s annual celebration. 

          He is a man of powerful sentiment as images, thoughts and sounds touch him in a universal way of gasping for a minute as an overpowering emotion runs across our skin and makes us breathless.  A friend of ours once told me, before our marriage, that Jim would never completely reveal himself to me.  I’m sure this is true in the same way that I don’t completely reveal myself to him.  And, yet, we are both transparent about our past lives and willingly share moments, secrets, observations about the other if it seems important to our marriage to do that.  We don’t willfully withhold information; it’s just that there is so much that we’ve each brought to this place that it would consume all of our time to rehash it.  And, to what end?  Comparison?  Standards to match?  Sorrows to soften?  We know enough of each other’s story to steer clear of comparisons and to soothe the sorrowful bits not by reliving them in their retelling but by layering new and happier moments to cushion them. 

In some ways, it is important to bring forward pieces of ourselves.  We have different senses of style and, because I have moved into Jim’s physical space, it sometimes seems important to me to create something that reflects, at least, me and, better, each of us.  I don’t think we are going to come together on styles of decorating – Jim is all leather and wood and the West where I would like to have an art deco birdcage artwork designed by a friend hanging in the stairwell.  Some subjects we avoid coming to conclusions about – the floors, for instance.  I want uniformity and Jim seems able to live with a different surface in every room, even the ones that flow together.  So we wait, talk about it from time to time, veer away from the conversation, sometimes come dangerously close to petulance but pull back from any spitfire disagreement.  I believe we’ll find ways to fit Jim’s ideas and my idea’s together; different perspectives with a common purpose to make each other comfortable. 

And, truth be told, what’s on the floors doesn’t really matter (although I still want what I want).  We’re in a wonderful house in a magical setting.  Right now, even though it’s New Year’s Eve, signs of the softer spring are all around us.  All the trees have a warm coat of moss on them but already the magnolia tree has white-tipped buds at the ends of its branches.  The Rhododendrons are fat with future blooms, even though leaves still cloak the branches.  Right now the buds look like processional royalty, adorned by robes of leaves. Beyond them, the decorative artichoke (I now know is called Cardoon) that I love so much has a healthy growth of its ruffled leaves and some immature spikes of the purple crowns they will wear all spring and summer.  This inner circle gives way to the fields and pastures before concluding with a proud and faithful ring of fir and pine trees.  I bring such a different landscape with me – the tall buildings, the always charged circuits of a city; another reminder that I am looking for ways to fit my bits of myself into this setting more than Jim has to. 

But that’s okay and it’s exciting to see what the merger will finally yield, not only in terms of our physical space but all the other stuff, too, like the horses birthdays.  I never even knew January 1^st was their acknowledged birthday but you can bet that tonight I’ll be out there with Jim when he takes a birthday candle and stands in front of each stall and sings to each horse. 

Posted by Holly at December 1st, 2007

Well, we got married again on November 17^th.  Combined, we’ve experienced seven weddings…. We knew we were going to, right from the first time, in May of 2006; we just had to wait for my annulment to be awarded so we could be married in the church, something that was important to Jim who wants to be able to have all the sacraments.  I didn’t exactly have to be convinced to go along with it simply because it was important to Jim, but I did have to understand why it was necessary in the first place.  My first marriage, the one under annulment scrutiny, ended 35 years ago, didn’t produce any children (there was only a yappy Maltese and I got him in the agreement), we split the china and silver 50/50, we each went on to have other marriages with progeny AND, we are both Jewish so the church had no legislation over the marriage in the first place. 

All through the two years it took to declare the marriage invalid, I kept thinking I would write about it, describe my feelings, report on the lofty conversations I had with church authorities before I agreed to pursue it, have a long section on the psychological impact of talking to my ex-husband for the first time in 35 years, refer to the old stuff about which I had to write more than 20 pages of documentation, cite church dogma and admitted hypocrisy as I couldn’t find a single person who thought it made much sense but, nonetheless, realized the process wasn’t going to change … that kind of thing.  But, that would be if I were writing an article about it.  For this purpose, it seems like a footnote to the more important fact that a second opportunity to marry this man turned out to be an interesting chance for reflection.

Our first year or so together was like a being on a brand new and exciting path with so much to see and learn and that also had sudden patches of broken sidewalk.  Jim calls it bumping up against each other and, I suppose, that’s a good way to look at the clashes.  Jim in charge, the TV executive, the head of household, the deal maker, the one who made everything work out in demanding atmospheres, used to making the decisions: Holly, just the same in many ways and at it on her own for a lot longer than Jim.  No wonder we bumped up against each other.

I had a conversation with a young friend at one point during that first year and a half of marriage, a woman who hasn’t yet been married but has come close a couple of times.  The relationships end before they get down the aisle and now she is wondering what is the point to marriage.  I understand what prompts her question and the chance to think about marriage again, prompted by a second ceremony helps me formulate my answer.  First of all, I know I had forgotten what it was like to be married and so I can clearly see that something different does happen in a married couple (of any combination of genders) and it is also part of what I grapple with in this marriage.  It has something to do with having a common path.  You can each keep your separate sidewalks but there has to be a common one on which you are heading in some direction at the same time and you do that because you are there for each other. It’s more than finding companionship: someone who laughs at the same places in TV shows or reads the books you like; it’s some sort of unspoken pact into which you enter and out of which ideas begin to unfurl and then entwine. It’s what happens when you are walking toward one another and you begin to smile – begin and find you can’t stop.  

In another relationship I had, not a legal union but as close to it as I got in between marriages, we were so definitely without a common path that nothing we ever did contributed to a new whole or a new future together.  Every day, every year, was the same as the one before – and not always great.  I would walk into his house on weekends and he would not alter his life one jot for me, let alone for an us.  By default, I couldn’t alter my life for him because I had to hang on to myself, knowing somewhere in my secret heart that there wouldn’t be any future for an us to develop.  So we spent time together and, honestly, some of it was nice and some of it was not nice but in none of it was there any togetherness nor did we spiral into creating anything new or valuable.

In a big way, Jim and I don’t have that opportunity to create a future together.  Young couples do. Even if they may not have a specific dream for the future, at least they know they’ve slipped hands together in a promise to go forward together.  We don’t have that.  Jim is living in his dream for retirement and the future.  Just like you’re supposed to invest in the stock market for the long term and then enjoy your investments, this is Jim’s long term.  This presented a dilemma for me.  How could I jump in and be a partner in a dream I didn’t share, would never have thought of in a million million years and struggle to feel any mastery over every day?  And, to boot, could I manage to find something of myself without a work identity or should I just surrender that part of my life and be a wife with no separate Holly purpose in life?  Because I always had to think of myself as my only support, I didn’t think about work as a means to an end.  Work was the end so I had to be doing something that I wanted or I’d have been totally miserable at all times.  I think if I go ask Jim right now, he would say that working all those years in TV was a means to an end, a way to support his real life, which was his home and family and dream for the future – the one he’s living in now (except, of course, neither of us ever thought of me being in it…).

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Yep.  I was right.  I asked him.  And, yet somehow, in spite of not having built this dream together, in spite of never having thought of each other in the way we now relate, we are something important together; something that can be felt and seen and experienced by people around us; a love palpable in its willingness to meld and blend into a new form with an energy that does have the capacity to change the world.  It doesn’t matter how big the world is that it might influence; it can be as small as touching the lives of one, two, three, or ten people who might encounter us and our lives or it might be as big as this farm or something else we can’t even fathom.

We talked about that during the required but welcome sessions with the priest who officiated at our second marriage ceremony.  He talked to us about the important role we might play as a model for people who would see our love, attachment and determination to create this new life. 

When I find myself wondering if it’s okay to not have a separate job or income, I realize I am looking for permission to push away feelings of guilt that I have this juicy bonus of sidling up next to somebody in a wide open day and figuring out what to do next.  Lately I’ve started having feelings that I want to share more of the day with Jim, be outside actually working although I don’t know how much use I’ll be.  These are strange feelings for someone whose real opinion of the great outdoors is that it is something to be enjoyed as a view out of your, minimum, 25^th floor apartment window in a city highrise.

Enough.  The second wedding is over and, really, there shouldn’t be any more.  Kind of too bad because it turned out I really loved getting married.  Jim has suggested that we can get married, again, on our 25^th wedding anniversary – when he will be 96 and I will be 85.