Girl love

My response to a narcissist

My last word to a narcissist I have known.

A simple snap of the wrist: short fiction

Marcy couldn't remember the first time she was 
jerked off-balance by a simple snap of the wrist.

The technique might have been perfected at home, when she was growing up. As the TV ad for the free yoyo in the box of Malto-Meal said: "Yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-YO-yo-yo" (to the tune of the Irish Washerwoman). It wasn't so remarkable then, as her sister Molly was thirteen and Marcy had just been born. It isn't very difficult to jerk a six-pound newborn on a string so it will dance, dance, dance on your hand like a malformed little doll.

This was her not-chosen environment for years. Everything about her was criticized, then the criticism was turned back on her: 

"Oh, you should stop being so self-critical." 

"For God's sake, when are you going to develop some confidence?" 

Her sister Molly, already an adult, played with her like a doll, exclaimed over her, then dumped her down in her crib and went out on a date.

Not to blame her, she was only a teenager, but it got much worse as she grew. Marcy was left in the living room with Tom, her sister's 30-year-old married boy friend, and both of them were drunk (drunkenness being encouraged when she was 15). The inevitable groping would go on in the dark, then when Molly found out, she would stare acid daggers of fury at her and say, 

"So, you want to go sit with my boy friend in there and romance him? Who do you think you are, anyway? What kind of slut would do that?" 

Yank, yank, yank.

Marcy made a life for herself, but it was hard, and her "craziness" was often remarked on, as if her sister had nothing to do with it.  Her "wedding present" was a statement, accompanied by a hard-eyed stare: "Gee, it must be great to have your whole life all figured out at age 19." Called on it later, Molly looked incredulous, said she didn't remember saying it, and looked at Marcy accusingly: how could she even think she could say something that mean? 

When Marcy moved from a small town to Vancouver, she expressed anxiety to her sister that she might not be able to adjust to such a leap. Her response, accompanied by  a shrug and a cool, matter-of-fact expression, was, "Then I guess you'll self-destruct."

At some point Marcy came to wonder: what is it about all this family poison that reproduces itself in your friends, the people who are supposed to be on your side?  At first Roseanne seemed fine, better than fine, and Marcy began to believe she had found her missing piece, the good sister she never had while growing up. But over time, the subtle jerking began. 

Roseanne, who very quickly became her best friend, soon moved away to a small town, and immediately began to believe she was terminally ill. She had no symptoms and refused to see a doctor. Marcy became frantic with worry and flew out to stay with her. Finally coerced into seeking medical help, she found out there was nothing wrong with her at all. But no one addressed the empty abyss inside her, and Marcy stifled the grumble of resentment that she had been sent out on a desperate rescue call for nothing.

Over time, more and more things happened, gradually insinuating themselves, sneaking in while no one noticed, things that were distressingly tangled, snarled up like a ball of useless marionette strings. The writing ambition she shared with Marcy when they met was soon abandoned, or at least denied. When she asked her friend if she had considered writing a column for the local paper (and later, keeping a blog), she made a sour, incredulous face and asked "What would I write about?", as if she had suggested climbing Mount Everest or calculating the value of pi (or, more likely, doing something incredibly stupid and even offensive). Her disdain covered a failed ambition, and Marcy thought she had seen that somewhere before.

Over the years, things escalated. Most of them weren't so much attacks as examples of "here, take this and fix it" or, at least, "listen to all of this unproductive ranting until you feel weary and sick of it and get nothing in return". And there was definitely a sense of entitlement. "Just give it to good old Marcy, I can always count on her." And then, that inevitable statement: "Oh, I feel a lot better now!"

After many years of attempts, Marcy wrote a novel about a silent film star, was excited about it - never thought she'd write a novel again - and showed Roseanne one of his short movies, wondering what her opinion would be. She looked at her with her head tilted at a strange angle and said, "Was he gay?" - then changed the subject.

The gay thing came up more than once, until Marcy realized she had never knowingly had any significant contact with a gay person, not because they didn't exist in her town but because she didn't want to.  When Marcy read a book about pianist Oscar Levant and was all bubbly and enthusiastic about it, Roseanne said in a disdainful, somewhat offended tone, "I thought he was gay." End of conversation, which was then steered to her own agenda. Apparently, anyone named Oscar was automatically gay, like Oscar Wilde. The disdain was automatic: let's write him off, shall we? The narrowness of her perception was shocking.

But the worst, and this went on for years and years (and years) was Roseanne's insistence that she should write a sort of hatchet job, a fictionalized expose of Canadian literature: all the petty, arrogant, narcissistic figures, editors, publishers, writers, hangers-on and wanna-be's. 

"Oh, I still think you should write it, Marcy. It would be so great. You could really stick it to those people and expose all their vanities and power-tripping to the public." Over and over again Marcy said, "But that would surely be the end of my career." A few months later she would say it again. She'd say, "But that would surely be the end of my career." A few months later she would say it again. She began to feel like a yo-yo yanked, a mouthpiece for her friend's frustrations as she rubbed her hands together and cheered on the sidelines, not so much for Marcy as for the expression of all her own frustrations coming out of someone else's mouth, risk-free.

Yank, yank, yank.

By this time, everything was externalized; the whole world was her yo-yo, convenient for never taking responsibility. Her public persona was of a warm, earth-motherish figure who took casseroles over to people she could not stand, a "see how nice I am" gesture while seething inwardly and constantly feeling "betrayed". Finally it became a volcano of bile, with Roseanne's "best friend" the only recipient (deemed "safe" because she didn't live there). Marcy saw her friend yanking the string on her disabled husband, cutting him off from his friends because for some reason she didn't approve of them. Yanking her 20-year-old daughter around, saying it would be "better for me if she didn't date" and going crazy with anxiety because she stayed out till midnight with her girl friends. (She said she would be home at 11:00!) 

After a while it was just an accumulation, and Marcy realized her friend was basically lost. Episodes came back to her that were wildly frightful and so dysfunctional that she couldn't get her head around it. She used to call her friend her "sister", and now she realized that she WAS her sister in all but blood, a frightening and even horrifying replication.

She came to see that she had taken on the role of "safe" confessor: safe because she didn't live there and would be sure to keep her mouth shut. But the more distorted and fucked-up Roseanne's observations became, the more she realized that, far from being safe, she was a repository for a twisted reality that bore very little relation to the truth. Thus her friend could say anything she wanted to, knowing Marcy couldn't call her on it; after all, she didn't live there and didn't know what was really going on.

But of course, when she finally stepped back, it was HER fault for ending a perfectly wonderful relationship for no reason and no warning, out of the clear blue sky.  Roseanne honestly didn't seem to know what had happened between them, an infuriating situation, acres of  blank empty oblivion surrounding what used to be - what should have been - a fine and focused mind.

Marcy writes in her journal, trying to get her mind around it all: 

I wonder sometimes how and why it gets so fucked up. It's horrible to see the worst patterns repeat and repeat, to be jerked around by someone who genuinely believes she is kind and giving. Someone with virtually no self-knowledge, but with a rich library of acid criticism of others, a library she does not use so much as push her friends into and lock the door.

Once when she asked Roseanne what happened to her writing ambition, she said, "It went away." This was a bizarre statement, to be sure; not "I gave it up", not "it was too hard", not "I couldn't stand to risk rejection", but "it" "went away", a separate little entity which got up on its little legs and crept out of her life all by itself.

There has been a theme all through their friendship: Roseanne constantly worries, obsesses that people think she's "crazy". Her behaviour in her town is so circumspect as to be stifling, but she won't let herself out of the box. The craziness swirls around and around in a corked bottle like a tiny, concentrated little genie. But if the genie ever emerges, her three wishes ("escape, escape, escape") won't come true.

Or maybe they will! For a long time now Roseanne has been looking up apartments on the internet - for herself, not including her chronically ill husband - secretly, while insisting she will stay in her town "another 10 to 20 years" (meaning, until he dies). Out of a heavy sense of "duty", she is waiting it out, as if drawing chalk-lines on the wall. Marcy sees that the person she had befriended all those years ago has been replaced by a stand-in of near-Stepford proportions, obsessed with what other people want her to be.

She also sees that, aware of it or not, she has been insidiously trying to torpedo her career for a very long time. There is a slightly nasty, vicarious feeling about it, a knee-slapping sense of "wouldn't it be a hoot" (if she alienated every single person who ever helped her publish her three novels). She was an intelligent woman. Didn't she think this through, or was it a deliberate cobra-strike?

Sometimes people outgrow each other, yes, but does it have to be so painful? Does the manipulation have no end? Invisible strings still yank and twist. Roseanne will have to turn back on herself now, but the choice of looking in the mirror is unlikely, as is the chance she will make a real friend in the community that she can actually talk to.

Marcy writes:

I hate it when I end up carrying someone, and it has happened more often than I care to admit. There must be some need in me, some desperation or fear that if I don't pander to that person's sick need, I won't have any friends at all. Probably that's true. It is tremendously hard to deal with and I have been struggling for some time, mostly with anger as more and more memories emerge, along with more and more anger. My sister too sees herself as a benevolent Mother Superior figure, religious, Christian, unconditionally loving and accepting, praying about everything (especially me!) because it makes her look better to herself. The truth is, she doesn't exist. I have wiped her out. Every few years, too cowardly to do this herself, she yo-yos my brother into checking up on me, making a report.  I suddenly remember the Bob Dylan line from Desolation Row:

"When you asked me how I was doing

Was that some kind of joke?"

Some kind of joke. I know that she hopes for one of two responses:

a) That I'll be a total mess, or dead, in which case she will pretend to grieve and tell herself, well, after all, it was inevitable, wasn't it? In spite of all her fervent prayers and  sincere attempts to help, she knew it was going to happen all along.

b) That I'll be doing well, and she will fly into a fury and say, how can she be so horribly selfish when she tried to destroy the family?

Is there winning here? Does it exist?

Still struggling, but no longer in quicksand - more like an insect emerging from a chrysalis - she writes:

Every once in a while I get piss-angry about all this, and my only solace - hell, it's more of a universe than a solace - is the family I have co-created with my husband of over 40 years, the one Molly said I didn't deserve and attained only through a sort of random lottery win.  (Weirdly, she even killed Rob off once, saying "if anything happens to him I'll help you raise the children" - co-opting them at the same time.) I even married into a relatively sane and basically benevolent, loving family who does not drink or use or molest little girls. I am their kin now in every way but blood.

It's not supposed to happen that way, it's the exception, causing my sister to say, no doubt, "Well, you see, nothing happened! Your childhood was fine. Everybody loved you. In fact, they loved you more than you deserved."

Get a big pair of scissors, please. Pinocchio's strings are cut.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Polygluts: or, More, More Mormons!

OK, then. You gotta ask yourself, when watching this is about as appealing as eating 19 pounds of Kraft Dinner with no ketchup, why it is that I keep going back to TLC's latest domestic sideshow, Sister Wives.

I guess I just have a mind for the appalling.

Please don't stare (because it's oh, so very intimate), but this guy Kody Brown the groovy long-haired polygamist crawls from bedroom to bedroom every night, or at least gets to choose whom he "cohabits" with, while the other wives lie there tatting or something.

Not content with his three starter wives (named Wynkin, Blynkinn and Nodde), he's decided to mix it up a little and do an add-on: someone a little younger, a little thinner, and certainly more fertile.

In other words, he wants more more more of those Mormons! Can't get enough of them. Though they look like ordinary women in most ways, his original wives must have extraordinary tolerance (or just be really stupid) to live this way year after year, their horde of interchangeable/interrelated savages (I mean, kids) running all over the place like kissing cousins from the backwoods of Appallachia.

I know a little bit about Mormonism. A little bit. I apologize to any real Mormons out there, because I'm drawing upon experiences from a holiday ten years ago. We went to Utah to see Bryce Canyon and other breath-arresting, God-drenched natural sights of Brigham Young country, and for the most part we had a great time.

We actually tasted the waters of the Great Salt Lake - mighty salty, hmmmmm! - and realized that those horrible little wigglies in the water, the only things that could live in anything that densely saline, were sea monkeys. Good thing my order never arrived back in 1962.

We went on a bus tour of Salt Lake City with two jolly Mormon tour guides, one of them serving his missionary time to fulfill the requirements of his faith. But these two guys weren't stuffy at all. They joshed about Brigham Young and polygamy, and claimed that the extremely wide streets of the city were built to accomodate Brigham when he went for a walk with all his wives.

When we visited the Mormon Museum, however, it was a completely different story. As complete as it was in tracing the history of a people and a faith, there was not one mention of polygamy anywhere. God knows I tried to find it, but it wasn't there. So, officially, that must mean that it never happened.

Fast-forward about ten years, and here we are in polyglut land, everything on display except the sex act (and maybe that will be next. How much of the upcoming wedding night will they show, I wonder?). This program is completely bizarre in that nothing anybody says ever matches their facial expression. "Oh, the more the merrier (marry-her?)," Blinkie says at one point, her face a study in repressed grief.

Robyn, the skinny, new, young wife-to-be (who's closer in age to the eldest daughters than the other three wives: ewwwwwwwww!), is the greatest actress of them all. She's. . . so. . . sorry. . . for. . . hurting. . . anyone, but. . . (but that doesn't stop her from yanking their husband away from them by the short hairs).

Closeups show her hand repeatedly shooting up to cover her mouth, her eyes squinching up, the other wives pasting on a look of concern. But there are no tears. Never any tears.

Why? Because Robyn isn't crying. She isn't crying because she doesn't give a shit about them. Not only has she landed a quarter-share in Kody the shaggy-haired reality star and his sexual equipment: she's getting her own house!

Yes. The other three have self-contained apartments within the massive family mansion (which must be paid for by some kind of ill-gotten gains, crackmongering or Ponzi schemes or something). But there's just no room left for Robyn anywhere, dad-burn it, so she has to live down the street. Down the street in a house. Down the street in a brand new house.

Her house.

I won't ask whose name the mortgage is in (or did they pay for it in unmarked bills?).
This new arrangement, even creepier than the former one, means that Kody will soon be strolling down the avenue, maybe with one of his 17 dogs, to pay her a conjugal visit every - what'll it be, fourth night? How will he - you know - "keep it up", do you think? (Blue pills, anyone?)

A bigger problem is how he will he manage the smoldering rage of the "Keep Sweet Three" and the fake histrionics of Robyn the dry crier. In the painful group discussions which abound in this show, Kody sits there scowling, his arm draped around his current favorite, listening to the suppressed anguish he has created with his own selfish, depraved choices, acting for all the world as if he has nothing to do with it, or at least has no power to stop it.

The truth is, he just has no desire to stop it. He does this because he can. He freely admits he's wounding his ever-faithful polygals, but in his typical heartless sociopathic manner he just keeps on smilin' and gosh-darn-in' and walking around like the swaggering prick he is, oozing entitlement and toxic power.

It gets even more offensive, if that's possible. He's going to marry a DIVORCED woman, for God's sake! Since when does a fundamentalist Mormon woman have the right to do that? One can only imagine the furious secret discussions, the hissings and wads of kleenex that have transpired from this particular choice. Nobody has dared to drag the nasty fact out into the light (yet), but it points up the staggering inequity in this unholy alliance. For those first three, divorce has never been an option: there is no way out of this marriage except death. After all, you can't divorce someone you aren't married to.

For all his modern-day-sensitive-guy posturing, Kody Brown is a self-centred, arrogant, narcissistic little creep who claims to have "fallen in love three times" (no, four: he left out himself). In truth, he's a master manipulator, not to mention a petty criminal, a bigamist who simply doesn't care what his wives are going through so long as he gets his "needs" met (and no doubt each wife has a specialty that she must call up whenever he wants it).

"Kody is my soul-mate," Robyn giggles while getting herself prettied up for another session of "courtship" with a thrice-married man (with Kody once more moaning about how hard it is to remember how to do this). The fact that he kisses her when he proposes provokes disbelief among the other three: you're not supposed to kiss 'til you get married! But after that, apparently, anything goes.

For him, that is. So long as he still has the strength left to walk down the street.

A bucket of hormones

I found out last night that it all comes down to hormones. Or chemicals, or whatever it is that lights up the brain.

According to this show, Secrets of the Mind or something like that, "love" just comes down to changes in the brain: violent changes, flooding the cortex and other structures with feel-good chemicals, along with the bizarre notion that it will always always always be this way, that we'll always feel this euphoric and live the rest of our lives on a fleecy pink cloud.

To me, it's a biohazard.

I'm not against love, not against romance, no nor any of it, or I wouldn't be posting pictures from A Room with a View, in which George clasps Lucy around her virginal, corseted waist and kisses the hell out of her. Oh God! These are my fantasies, and I freely admit it. I'm just a transplanted Victorian, and wish I had the same masses of untameable dark hair and smoldering eyes, and got to wear those great outfits.

The show about the secrets of the mind had an English couple (let's call them George and Martha) who were recently married and decided to "test" the durability of their love by getting brain scans, going on an arduous months-long cycling trip that would include all sorts of awful hardships, then having their brains tested again.

If their brains still lit up with ecstatic electrochemical activity even after the road trip from hell, then it would prove that they were Really In Love. If not, well. . .

Guess what, folks: the woman's brain somehow still held on to the hormonal brush fire, but his didn't. Oh man, that brain scan was pathetic. It had somehow all turned grey. All the fiery reds and yellows had fizzled out.

His wife was absolutely devastated. Imagine, not being able to sustain the role of Prince Charming for the rest of your life! Imagine not constantly experiencing honeymoon bliss for forty or fifty years. It was unthinkable.

Here I want to pause on this story - it's boring the piss out of me anyway, as it's so distorted and patently false - and talk a bit about weddings. I remember a time in the early '70s when all sorts of proclamations were issued about the Changing Role of Women. No longer were we delicate little princesses tripping around in high heels. If we did undertake a "romance", it would be a partnership of equals, quite possibly between two women. Marriage was out, or consisted of a quick civil ceremony: get the nasty business over with as quickly and cheaply as possible.

At that point, all domestic chores were split exactly down the middle. When it came right down to it, each partner would wash half a dish.

Fast forward a few decades, and it has all lapsed back to the '50s, or even before that. Huge puffy white gowns, a million bridesmaids, a $500 cake made by that Buddy guy on that show, a few hundred guests, catered reception, etc. etc. etc.: these are standard now, and women (and, alarmingly, little girls) are all being conditioned to return to fainting passivity.

Fuck equality! Bring on the princesses.

I see it every day: I have three grandgirls, and everything they play with is princess-themed. The princess movies make a feeble attempt to mention traits like self-confidence and self-esteem, but for the most part all they do is sit around waiting to be rescued.

I can't help but think this stampede back to traditional customs (and spending) is some sort of reaction against feminism and its disturbing implications that not all is equal in gender-land. Who wants to hear about that, when the girls can get together to giggle, drink Sangria and watch beefy, oiled-up gay men gyrate and strip?

I often feel - and maybe this is my age - that I'm outside of things, but I'm outside of things deliberately because the "things" alarm me so much. I refuse to use the word "iconic" to describe items like cupcakes. I won't say "agaaaaahhn" for "again", or "fesssshhhh" for "fish". For some reason, my jaw won't drop to my chest like that.

I don't tweet. Hey, listen, I really don't object to the act of tweeting itself. But why the hell call it something so lame, so brainless? If someone had told people twenty years ago that there would be a popular means of communication called tweeting, they would have laughed at you in disbelief or looked at you with an incredulous, even offended expression.

I have a bird that twitters, I have a bird that sings, but that's about all.

I'm not against technology, but why does a recent innovation have to be called Skype? Can you think of an uglier word? Worse than Vonage, worse than Voip, worse than anything.

I care about words, I care about how people use and pronounce them. They are my stock in trade. Now, how did I get onto this? Anyway, four months later, George and Martha got their brains tested again. Everyone held their breath. If George's brain was still grey, well, that would be the end of the marriage.

But he went back inside that frightening sausage-roll thing, in spite of his claustrophobia. This is the sort of story producers of reality shows manipulate all the time. They manufacture happy endings, even for dismal cases of hoarding in which the person lives in a sickening, gagging landfill. They call it a happy ending if the person (or the producer) has cleared a 6-inch wide path. They. . . never mind, they did it again, and George's brain was nice and sparkly and red, all lit up like a Christmas tree. (Obviously, they had kept the first scan on file.)

"Oh, darling!" his wife exclaimed. It was like something out of a Monty Python sketch with Michael Palin and Carol Cleveland.

I'm not sure what my central point is here, but I do wish couples would put half the energy into marriage that they do into the wedding.

Partners fart and burp and go to the bathroom. They get testy and even furious, and critical. Their needs don't match. Their interests don't match. Their sexual urges don't match. They get sick of each other sexually and want variety. They have huge rows about finance, and mortgages, and whose house they'll go to for Christmas dinner. They'll think to themselves: I can't believe what I've gotten myself into!

If they come home late, even a little bit late, they will have to explain why. They'll put something important down, a notebook or laptop or a pair of shoes, and when they look again, it'll be gone. Their partner will have "put it away". The chicken salad they were saving so they wouldn't have to slave over dinner on a hot day will be eaten: the dirty plate won't even be in the dishwasher! It will be sitting there on the counter surrounded by globs of salad and greasy crumbs.

Laundry, well, don't look too close, especially at underwear. Princesses aren't supposed to have secretions, or those little menstrual accidents that happen to absolutely every woman. And men aren't supposed to have. . .well, I do have limits as to how explicit I am willing to be.

This is life, not too savoury or smooth. Often it's just boring, or at least very tame. Vacations cost too much, so you stay at home and snap at each other. You gain weight, inexplicably, then gain some more. Mother-in-laws nag. Father-in-laws drain all your best booze. One day, hubby stumbles upon a web site, simply fascinating. Well, there' s nothing wrong with appreciating feminine pulchritude, is there?

Meanwhile, she is getting into conversations at work with a guy that makes her just scream with laughter. It's incredible: they have exactly the same sense of humor. (George hasn't made her laugh in six years.) One day, he looks at her intently and tells her she has the most beautiful eyes he has ever seen.

That's the story of, that's the glory of love.

I've been married 37 years, to the same guy. People are incredulous when they hear that. For one thing, they assume I'm 100 years old, when in truth I'm only 97. They want to know The Secret. They want to know the formula. Is there one?

Yes.

There are a couple of things I've found that are absolutely indispensible. My husband and I couldn't be more different in temperament and interests and personal assets.

But there are two crucial things we have in common: first of all, our values are practically identical. (What are values, you say? It's not something you attain for $10.99 at Walmart. It's the principles you live by, and the things you hold most dear.)

Recently we went to one of those pioneer places where a town had been replicated, complete with authentic artifacts. This was from 1920, however, and over and over again, Bill and I kept saying, "Hey, look at that wicker chair (or cheese grater or meat grinder or bread box). My grandmother had one of those."

Sometimes it was even "my mother". Soon it was clear we were blood kin, or maybe even twins. At very least, we had the same grandmother. This went beyond mere artifacts and straight into the heart of how we live. Our grandmothers (and our mothers) lived in such an identical manner BECAUSE THEY CARED ABOUT THE SAME THINGS and imparted those same values to their children.

The other thing is: shall I quote Aretha here? R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Respect will hold like powerful glue long after the flimsy post-it paste of romance lets go. Even when I wanted to throttle him, I never stopped respecting him. Why? Because, somehow or other, when I was 18 years old (yes, 18 years old), I made a good choice. Can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

I'm sick of this now, so I'll stop, but I hope I've gotten some things across. If you want the pumping, swollen, slippery, ecstatically moaning highs of "romance" (which I think is just a code-word for lust), use your hand, or your finger. And try to stay off those porn sites.

Cereal monogamy

This blog was originally going to be about the Writer's Life, until I realized there were already approximately one billion blogs called the Writer's Life, so to hell with that idea! I do however like the image of the tightrope walker (a picture of great-uncle Howard in 1906) and its implications of an endless struggle for balance.

That's a long way of saying I can write about anything I bloody want to, and probably will. The last blog I tried to keep, which eventually crashed in flames, was far too creative (hmph!) and eventually harassed into an early demise.

Or at least that's how it seemed to me.

This one, well, I'm barely keeping a foothold as I struggle with details that are probably ridiculously simple for anyone else. So I just bash away at it, wondering what all those little dragonflies are and why I can't post a photo in the middle of my post. Oh foo, someone will attack me soon anyway.

So what's this about? Cornflakes, I guess, and the way a certain man eats them (every day for 37 years, and perhaps more). Do I represent the cornflakes of his life? In any case, that's how long we've been together.

People wax romantic (or at least wax their cars) when they find out that we've been together for such a jaw-dropping amount of time. I was, of course, ten when I married him. Bill is a good guy, but he drives me crazy. He's irritating. He has gone deaf and won't admit it. And God, he looks old. If he's my mirror, then I am in big trouble.

But nothing could ever take the place of so much shared experience, grief, elation, and the boring trudge of everyday existence. The cornflakes of life. There are still times when I wonder if I can stand this, but I know no one else could live with me, with my permanent tendency to ricochet when things go wrong or I get pissed off.

He's a good guy, like I said, a very smart guy, a professionial (environmental expert, which is direly needed these days), but most of all a man who protects his family and loves them without reservation. His Dad lived to be 93 and towards the end, ANYTHING would make him cry. It was irritating, but what's even more irritating is that Bill is moving inexorably in the same direction. As my daughter once put it, "He cried when the hamster died."

There's a neat saying that sums it all up: "The rocks in his head fit the holes in mine." I'm supposed to be the crazy one, but maybe we're meeting in the middle (or I've driven him crazy, whatever). I don't get it, the unutterable part of it, the thing I can't explain: maybe it's like that old Jerome Kern song, Bill.

"And I can't explain, it's surely not his brain

That makes me thrill

I love him, because he's -

I don't know,

Because he's just. . . my. . . Bill."

Oh yah.