My Boudica

What husbands and wives say to each other. Talking about the ones who are really married, not just cohabiting for a while. They’re not like other people. Apart, they’re only half a person. Why they need someone else to complete their sentences, their thoughts, their lives. Why they fall silent at times. The other half already knows, has heard all the stories, is thinking the exact same thing, and only one word is necessary to retune the symphonic instrument they both are playing.

It’s not always friendly sounding. Like, I know a woman who could be my wife’s twin, except my wife doesn’t have a twin. Her real sister is nice. But this other woman is eerily similar — Irish, redheaded, diminutive, shockingly smart, etc — except that she’s also controlling, interfering in other people’s business, and mean as a snake. You should hear her trash her husband of 40 years. You’d know in a second that she hates him, every detail and moment of their life together. Except that she loves him absolutely, as protectively as any mother, with the sole exception that he’s never to know just how much she loves and needs him. But of course he does know. Which is why he puts up with a stream of verbal abuse that would put me in a penitentiary for life. Married talk. It takes different people differently. As it should. The rest of us are always on the outside looking in. Or trying to.

And, no, I’m not talking code about my wife. Almost everybody is afraid of MY wife. She’ll spear your heart in a second. She’s fair, though, and far from psychotic. They fear her because she’s the smartest and most honest person they know. How did I get so lucky? Beats me. But I like to think we really are the two halves who found one another. That’s not a Hallmark Channel ad. It’s just the most plausible probability.

For example, from earliest childhood, she always wanted to live in this Godforsaken corner of New Jersey wilderness with its horses and marshes. I spent half a lifetime trying to leave it. I came home because you CAN go home again, Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding, and so here we are. It’s not a fight, not a compromise. It’s an arrival at the same place by different paths.

Same with everything else pretty much. Ever since Michael Vick, she roots for the Ravens of Baltimore. Because there’s no way she could ever care again for her once beloved Eagles. I admire that consistency of spirit, which is exactly as consistent as mine. We’re in tune, you know. Did I mention that? You should have heard her yesterday yelling the Eagles on when DeSean Jackson got loose in the secondary and was streaking toward the end zone while I was having a pit stop in the bathroom. “Go! Go! Go! Run! Run! Run!” Or words to that effect. The wall rattled. Made my heart sing, it did.

And this is really embarrassing. There was an interval of real human grownup time on Saturday when we were watching three college football games at once, one on the TV, one on the iPad, and one on her deftly programmed iPhone propped before her on its tiny stand.

Before me, she didn’t know college football existed. Before her, I didn’t know bleak Russian and Scandinavian dramas existed. Just you wait till I learn how to watch three of them at once. I know. The world trembles.

That makes it sound like a simple trade. It isn’t. It’s an expansion, a doubling. I’ve learned to love the Irish, she the Scottish. I’ve learned about greyhounds, she’s learned about cars and motorcycles. And Scottish deerhounds, which just couldn’t be any more complicated than the Christ-like simplicity of greyhounds (though I’m betting Jesus didn’t snack constantly on cat poop).

Yesterday, we learned the lowdown about Horatio at the bridge. Which I misremembered as a father son story. It’s much closer to being a marriage story. A thing about being the one who’s willing to make a stand when everyone else is just screwing around.

Would your wife care about Horatio at the bridge? Not trying to compare, because most men I know wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about Horatio either. It’s just that life’s biggest kick is feeling your own energy infusing another’s. My wife has actually become a Buckeye fan. Nobody can fake that. And, no, she’s still not what I would call a Sinatra fan, and I’m still lagging in the passion for birthday cards for everyone, but it’s swum into my ken. She’s enlarged me, and we do have an uncanny talent for finishing each other’s sentences.

Something else. She keeps showing me that she’s natively better at things I’m supposed to be good at. One example and then I’ll stop, I promise. I chafed at the fact that Brit TV dramas make it look as if the UK is demographically similar to the U.S., because when I looked it up the actual statistics are ridiculous. Blacks and Indians are both under two percent of the population there. You’d never guess it from their TV fare. Police, judiciary, all diversity personified. And, well, criminals too. Understandable, though. The Brits are two, three, or eight times more violent than we are… I announced the population facts somewhat indignantly a while ago, during one of the shows we both enjoy watching.

Yesterday, my wife proposed — while we were watching Luther — that she had figured it out: all the black people in the U.K. are employed as actors. Contradiction solved. Perfect.

See? Life is so much more fun than the cynics tell us it should be. Laughter really does cut through all the crap.

Not a sermon. Just an appreciation.

P.S. My wife just said something about a cow. It think it was about Mara Liasson from NPR. Now she wants to say something else. Geez. But here goes:

What a great picture. Wish I looked like that. A great post too.