posted: July 29, 2001
"Is this the face that won for her the man
whose amazed and clumsy fingers
put that ring upon her hand....?"
--Stan Rogers
A little over 13 years ago, I was standing in the doorway to a backstage area at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, California. Though it was early April, the canyon already smelled of dry grass and and an ocher dust which pervades everything. We had spent 4 weekends in a row clearing the rolling, rocky ground and building a temporary building to house the operations and crew of the amusement booth, and were now in the final stages of dress rehearsal for what was, then, the most immersive historical fair in the US. For 6 weeks every Spring, we sucked people into the England of Elizabeth I.
I was watching my boss talk to a couple of young men who wanted to work for us. One was tall and skinny and blonde. One was shorter, wiry, dark-haired and playing the flute. As to myself, I probably looked pretty strange in my tightly-drawn bodice and long, heavy skirts, but hatless, so that my then horrifically-shorn hair rioted in sweaty cowlicks around my already-dirty face. A modern head on a 16th century body, like something out of Bosch.
Seven years later, I married one of these men, and he assures me I was the sexiest thing he'd ever seen at that moment. Which is funny, because I thought the same thing.
I don't usually treat this space like a personal journal, since it wasn't intended for that, and, if I had had my shit together a little better, this would have gone up earlier in the week, but I didn't and it didn't and here you sit, probably after the date has already past, reading and thinking I'm a complete whacko. Well, I am.
Six years ago today, I married the dark-haired one. We stood on the compass rose in a park in West Seattle and many of the guests were the people who had worked beside us at the Renaissance Faire, including our boss and his soon-to-be-wife. The ceremony went well, though the reception afterward was, from my point of view, a disaster. I wish I hadn't done it.
Not the marriage. The reception. Less than 30 people in a hall intended for 100. Food which didn't stretch far enough and a DJ who came unprepared, didn't play what we'd asked for and kept wandering off after starting the reception by playing the wrong piece of music. I almost brained him with a champagne bottle, from which he was saved by the quick intervention of my new mother-in-law. I doubt assault and battery would have been a good way to start my married life.
In the theater they say "lousy dress rehearsal, good opening night". If the ceremony and reception were our dress rehearsal, then the aphorism holds. It's not been perfect and sometimes it hasn't been easy, but after 6 years, I am still married to the only man I want to spend the rest of my life with.
He's not what I expected. As a kid I had the usual ridiculous romantical notions about marrying someone tall, dark, handsome and terribly clever. He's not tall.
My husband is a techno-geek, barely half and inch taller than I am, with some personal and political views some people find downright alarming. I on the other hand, am a complete lunatic with the subtlety of a smashed orange in a white-tile bathroom. At least I smell nice....
Reality has a weird and unsettling way of handing you not what you expected but what you need. My husband is not the person I would have expected to love, if someone had shown him to me when I was a kid, or even a teenager. We come into the world of other people with some silly notions, believing, perhaps, in TV and fairy-tales, where the hero is always young, handsome, athletic, brilliant and rich, and the heroine is young, beautiful and clever. After banging around for a long time, not finding a fairy-tale, you start to think it just isn't true for you. There is no right person and you will never love or be loved in that fairy-tale way.
Well, you won't. Because fairy-tales are meant for children and for comfort on dark and lonely nights. But the reality is that there is something much better than a fairy tale.
There are the people who illuminate you. Whose presence and whose friendship lift you up and make you feel that there is something right about you, that you really are as wonderful as they tell you. They are the true friends and among them there is a light which is steadier and stronger than the rest. It doesn't falter or fade even when things are awful. It doesn't flare up and burn out when overfed or when winds of fortune blow across it. That's the love of a lifetime. It keeps burning steadily and always brings you home.
Forty-five years from now? Hell, Jim, how about 145. Want to try it?
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