marriage | pull up a chair

February 15, 2019

love story of unlikely plot line

it all started when the dishwasher broke. well, not the whole story. but this latest installment in the look-back machine.

the little green light on the old reliable dishwasher, the one that’s scrubbed up after graduations (grade school, high school, college) and christmas and bar mitzvahs (twice), the one that’s worked monday through sunday for a good 13 years, it started to blink incessantly. i tried every trick in the book but could not get the blinking to cease. so i looked it up in that all-purpose answer box, the internet, and discovered the blink that won’t stop is short for “call the repairman.” so i did.

when he arrived in the depth of the latest cold snap, the kind man with the toolbox asked for the instruction manual (not so sure it’s a very good sign when the repairman wants to check the manual). that’s what led me to the cobwebby corner of the basement, where one creaky file drawer led to another and suddenly i was staring at a row of neatly filed manila envelopes, each one bearing my scribble. each one with a label of sorts: “bk beginning,” “+BDK msgs,” “memories — BAM/BK.”

this certainly wasn’t the clue to how to work the dishwasher, but i was decidedly sidetracked there in the dark in the basement. i reached for the stash titled “memories,” and out slid a slice of my long-ago past.

the very first thing i found, in a crisply typed envelope addressed to me at the chicago tribune, was a letter from one of the loveliest priests that ever there was. a long lean gray-bearded runner with the gentlest dark-blue eyes, an irishman who walked about the neighborhood in his irish cable-knit sweater, doffing his irish-wool cap and pausing to listen to all sorts of sidewalk confessions. father fahey was his name, father john fahey, and the letter i held in my hands, the letter he’d typed in april of 1989, it literally, was a letter that would change my life.

not too many weeks before he’d written the letter, that gentle-souled priest had answered the door of the rectory, and ushered in me and the tall bespectacled fellow i’d fallen in love with. the one who was decidedly jewish, and not at all sure what to do with an irish catholic — this one, in particular. we’d knocked on the rectory door because we were looking for answers, looking for a way for a jew and a catholic to begin a journey we never wanted to end. we had an inkling that we’d found in each other something we might have always been looking for. except for the part where i was catholic and he was jewish. that twist in the narrative plot was making it tangled.

we knew father john to be wise, the sort of soft-spoken fellow to whom you could bring your worries and woes. so we climbed the grand winding staircase behind him, and sat ourselves down across from his armchair, up in his study at the top of the stairs. father john listened. and spoke only three words: “follow your bliss,” he told us, as if a buddhist koan we were to decipher. we’d climbed to the top of the priestly stairs to be handed a three-word instruction.

well, then.

we tucked those words snugly into our pockets and chit-chatted just a little bit longer. then we left and, some weeks later, the letter arrived. paper-clipped to the letter was the “business card” of another priest (do priests have business cards? well, in this case, in the case of a priest who always claims “i’m in the god business,” a business card it was).

gentle john the priest wrote that i should “take [my] love for Blair, and [my] search for God into [my] heart, and patiently, prayerfully wait for the answer to come.”

and then, in the very next paragraph, he typed: “God may be responding immediately.”

holy cow! that is some service!

father john then proceeded to tell me that he’d just bumped into a priest who happened to mention that he’d pulled together a group, “jews and catholics, who are living through the religious test which their love presents.”

“i think that some are married,” father john wrote, “some are thinking of marriage. i immediately thought of you, and so i asked for the priest’s card.” call him, he tells me.

and so i do, i do call the priest with the business card, and the tall bespectacled one and i knock on his rectory door. and he, too, ushers us in, and sits us down in chairs, and tells us words we’ll never forget: “i’m in the god business. god is love. you’re in love, so how can i help you?”

we explain; he responds: “there’s one God. you both pray to the same God, but you pray in two different languages.” he paused long enough to shoot us a look that meant he meant business. in short order, he shooshed out the door: “go with God and go in love.”

so we did. the priest with the business card has been there all along the way. and so was a rabbi, the one who two years later would marry us (along with another priest, an old friend of the family). they were both there in our tiny back garden, in the days just after 9-11 when the whole world shuddered, but we cradled a newborn baby, and it was the day for the baby’s blessing, which is like a baptism, but it comes in two religions. they were there at two first communions, and two bar mitzvahs. they’ve been there again and again.

and that was 30 years ago. and 31 years ago tonight, the tall bespectacled one walked into my apartment for the very first time. i can still see him rolling up the sleeves of his white brooks brothers button-down. can still see him taking a seat at my tiny circle of a kitchen table, can remember how while i pulled foil-wrapped salmon packets from out of the oven, he told me of a thai soup he’d eaten the night before and how it “was a symphony of flavors.” i remember my ears perked at the description. i remember how something else perked at the rolling up of the sleeves.

i can’t say i’d spent much time before then considering the notion of love at first sight, but i know i felt a thump in my chest that night, almost the minute he walked in the door. and sitting here now at this old, scratched maple table, listening to him pull the carton of milk from the fridge and the special K from the pantry, i can conjure that thump in a heartbeat.

and i gaze over at that letter, the one father john typed, sealed, and slipped into the mail chute all those years ago. and father john is gone now. (by the way, he too followed his bliss, left the priesthood, married a widow (his best friend’s widow), moved to northern california, and died a few years ago…) but his letter, unearthed just this week from the dark of a drawer in the basement, it’s a treasure.

no wonder i saved it.

it saved me. and us.

happy 31 years to the bespectacled one, though this day does not mark the day that you fell for me. that would come later, months later. i’m the one who counts this day as the very beginning. i knew what i knew when i knew it. in time, you knew it too.

the old maple table dressed up for the day of hearts

will you tell a love story?

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August 26, 2016

if i’d known…

bambkchuppah

a quarter century ago, on a steamy august sunday afternoon, i remember peeking out my bedroom window into the backyard of the house where i grew up. i remember the swiss lace curtains rippling in the breeze, catching in my veil. down below, beneath a canopy of old oaks, oaks whose boughs arced across the yard, a dappled dome of leaves reaching out to oak leaves, tidy rows of white wooden chairs stood sentry. a brass quintet began to play. the chairs filled in.

boysand me wedding my father wasn’t there, had been gone 10 long years by then, so my brothers, all four of them, took me by the arms. i’d walked down the stairs i’d once tumbled down as a clumsy little girl, the ones where i sat after bee stings, on afternoons when my mama dried my tears. we’d walked out the front door, my brothers and i, arm in arm in arm, the five of us, and threaded through the garden gate. the late august garden was in bloom; my mother had made sure of that. and there, at the dip at the bottom of a sloping lawn, where the chairs gave way to chuppah, was the tall, dark, quite handsome fellow to whom i would wed my life.

BKsyl

we wed — in catholic and jewish, with priest and rabbi, and chuppah and seven blessings and smashing of the glass. we wed under the cathedral of trees, and all the while i worried that my beloved’s 80-something-year-old grandma might cave in from heat and sauna-like steaminess. (i’d prayed for no rain, and my prayers were answered; i forgot to pray for no sauna.) i remember much of that day, frame after frame still tumbles clearly through my memory, because a wise soul had instructed me: freeze-frame the moments, one after another, seal it to your soul.

but now, 25 years after that picture perfect day, i’m afforded a perspective, a longview, that shifts and changes everything. the whole of it is deepened, the colors richer, the lines sharper-edged, even as the pictures in the album begin to fade. it is a portrait of life and love in all its messy, wrenching iterations, and, yes, in all its magnificence. it’s a portrait i take in with breath-catching awe. love does not come easy, but love when it lasts, when it sinks deep down into your marrow, it carries you to places you’d not imagined, places you never thought you’d know. it carries you across unbearable stretches, and delivers you to moments you’ll never forget.

from where i stand now, i can see all that’s unfurled since that august sunday. i can see the light and shadow. i recall the hours when my heart pounded so hard i could hear it thumping sharp against my hollow chest wall. i riffle through the frames, the glories and the tight spots. i can see the night when i nearly howled in sorrow, when my baby girl’s string-bean of a tiny self slipped into my hands, miscarried in the deep of darkness. just beyond the bathroom door was the man i’d wed.

the man i wed is in every single frame of every single story that matters.

when i tick through the litany — the life and death, the anguish, the exhaustion — that we’ve navigated, side-by-side, heart-to-heart, i begin to catch a glimpse of the rootedness of what it means to whisper vows, to seal promise after promise, before a crowd of those you love, of those who’ve known you longest, or best, or most deeply.

we made a promise to be the hand at the small of each other’s back. we made a promise to search always for joy, for hope, and to find and collect sparks of God all along the way.

we could not have known that there would come a day when that meant one of us was staring at her watch in a surgical waiting room outside the chamber where the doctors threaded a wire into the heart of the other one of us, and we both prayed mightily that they’d zap just the right spot, and the awfulness would end.

we could not have known that there would be a day when emergency room doctors would look us in the eye and talk of airlifts and our firstborn’s spinal cord. and, during that longest hour of our lives, we would both pray the very same prayer. and we would both end with signs of the cross (his made backwards, because he’d never before made one, but this moment seemed to beg the unimaginable).

we could not have known of the late-night phone calls, the sleepless nights, the groggy mornings when the bad news wouldn’t lift, and we felt sunk before we even slid from under the covers.

but we do know now. and we know that somehow — together, as much as deep inside the solitude of our own many-chambered souls — we found our way to the clearing, to the place where shafts of light once again dapple the landscape.

we’ve tread together the topography of deeply-held promises. we know the canyons of despair. and we’ve glimpsed our share of beauties from the rises along the trail.

there are particular lessons to be learned in long years entwined. when the one soul you count on — even when you’re without a clue of just how you’ll navigate the latest labyrinth — is the one who’s watched your hair streak through with silver, and your face grow etched with lines.

we’ve inscribed the pages of our book, the chapters of our life well and deeply loved. we’ve birthed two souls, breathed all we could into their every day and struggle. we’ve made a home, a sacred refuge where the door is always open, an extra place always set. we’ve kept our promises.

if i’d only known. i would walk down that aisle once again. i’d take your hand — and your heart. and i’d whisper all those promises. from this day on, for life.

what a quarter century has brought me: this huddle of the deepest love

amen.

i know that life journeys come in countless iterations — alone, entwined, shattered by loss. and while i don’t often write of the one to whom i’m married, i couldn’t help being struck by the power of love long-held. love sealed august 25, 1991.

what’s the love that sustains you? or what lessons have you learned across the long haul?

p.s. prayers for someone i love having hip surgery monday. prayers for everyone at the table — especially one particular mama — weathering heartache.

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January 30, 2015

sixty…a long, long love story.

sixty.

sixty years ago today, on a crisp january sunday, two people i love walked into the plaza hotel at fifth avenue and central park south in new york city, the very hotel where precocious eloise lipsticked the walls, roller-skated the corridors and poured water down the mail chute of the neo-rococo gatsby-esque overnight chateau. the two i love were married there. moved into an old gardener’s cottage nestled between the two rivers of fair haven, new jersey. and two-and-a-half years later, had a baby boy. five years after that, they carried home to the cottage a beautiful baby girl.

and 29 years after that, i married their firstborn. so, going on a mere 24 years this august, my beloved and i are lowly pikers in the marriage department (compared, that is, to the ones clocking their diamond anniversary today). the ones married at the plaza, they’ve long been teaching us how it’s done — this business of loving across the arc of time, of holding each other up in sickness and in health, in heart-wrenching moments and moments so fine they make you think you could reach right out and touch the stars.

this morning, for the first of the 60 anniversary mornings, there will be no shared breakfast at the maple table in the red-walled kitchen. there will be no bagel sliced and barely-buttered. no stack of vitamins tucked by the edge of the red plate, where my mother-in-law always tucked them. there will be no single cup of coffee with a splash of skim milk, one cup shared by two pairs of lips, the way they’ve always sipped their coffees. this afternoon, perhaps, my mother-in-law will help adjust the wheelchair at the dining table in the lovely place they call the atrium, the place where my dear father-in-law now lives.

in a world where only six percent of american marriages make it to the 50th anniversary — and guessing drastically fewer make it to the 60th — there is much to be learned from those that do. and while i’ve not sat down to ask a slew of pesky nosey questions, i have been watching. and since i’ve lived since 1991 with the son of that solid pair, i’ve had lots of mornings, noons and nights to ponder this living, breathing organism, the long-haul marriage.

it’s the unlikeliest of arrangements, for starters. did you ever think you’d want anyone to know that some nights you tumble into bed without washing your face, or that you gobble down a humongous bowl of popcorn at the long day’s end — no matter how late the hour? would you ever want anyone to know how scared you get before you stumble toward a microphone, or how your heart practically pounds through your chest when you raise your hand in class, or — sometimes — speak up at a dinner party? or how, once upon a time, you worried yourself into such a stew convincing yourself that the black space in your unborn baby’s ultrasound was proof that the sweet child was going to be born without a brain? and, further, you convinced yourself that the doctors just couldn’t find the words to let you in on this terrible news. and then, when you found out you’d been a total fool and the brain was fully lodged right where it was meant to be, the dear fellow who’d been gobsmacked all weekend by your worries, he didn’t even dare to toss a chilly “told you so!” in your much-deserved direction.

oh, and that’s just a teeny wedge of the intimacies that long connections bring. i mean, the standing naked — the showing off your pudgy belly, your jiggly thighs — that’s NOTHING compared to the soul-baring that comes with years spent sharing each other’s crowded space.

and there are days — maybe even months or years — when you spend way too much time considering the exit door.

but you never go.

a.) because you’re blessed beyond words that whatever isn’t right is fixable — because, oh, lordy, we all find our lives — our inner, dearest circles — populated with friends and loved ones for whom the fixing was not there — death, disease, inherited pathology, deceit. the reasons are too many and too heartbreaking.

and then, there’s b.) we choose to fix it, to work it through, to strike a peace accord. because deep down in our marrow we’re betting on this marriage thing, this connection bound through love or law, divine or secular. we’ve invested whole hog in this institution that, not unlike a pair of lungs, expands and contracts, fills with oxygen, and sometimes leaves us gasping.

and after you’ve weathered days or weeks or months of second-guessing, and you find the clouds have scuttled off, you remember once again just why it was that something deep down inside you — something that maybe didn’t even have a voice, was no more than life-divining force — you remember why you surrendered to it long ago. why you dared to wrench open your trembling heart, and let in the one best shot you had at being wholly alive.

because this someone to whom you’ve aligned no less than your very soul, this someone has breathed wholeness into you. this someone has seen who you could be, sometimes long before you could even begin to glimpse that possibility.

in my case, the man i married teaches me every single day what patience looks like. what tender loving care is meant to be. i watch him lavishly rub circles on our little guy’s back, there in the hollow between the angel blades, on the nights when sleep won’t come, or ghosts have come to haunt the little guy’s bedroom. i watch the man i love drive eight hours for a regatta in which the glimpse of a passing kid — a kid in a boat being rowed by eight or four muscled pairs of arms — lasts for maybe five seconds. and not a complaint, not a single complaint, is ever lodged.

in my case, the man i married has patiently waited for the three long years i’ve not had a paycheck. and he’s been the biggest believer that if i dared to spread my wings, i just might find the breeze he believes is there. and for a girl who never ever thought she could be good enough, it is the holiest thing in the whole wide world to wake up every morning to a fellow who utterly and absolutely believes that, armed with nothing but my heart and my words, i might infuse a dash of goodness in the world.

the man i love learned all this because he grew up in a house where that’s what love looked like. that’s what marriage meant. thick and thin. sickness and health. richer and poorer.

sixty years.

may the God of goodness, the God of love, shine down today on the ones who, back on january 30, 1955 — when “bad day at black rock” was playing at the picture shows, and the ames brothers’ “the naughty lady of shady lane” was number 1 on the charts — back then, those blessed two began to etch their story in the marbled walls of time.

the lovely black-and-whites above, that’s my papa-in-law, the newspaper man, blowing out his birthday candles (in 1970, i do believe), and the radiant-faced one (which i can’t get to nestle side-by-side, and so is just below), a teacher nestled with her little charges, that’s my beloved mother-in-law, one of the loyalest readers of the chair that ever there was or will be. bless them both. i love them with all my heart.

i don’t often — rarely ever — write about one of the deepest connections of my life, my marriage. this one is stirred by the big anniversary. and i know — too well — that the true intimacies of any marriage don’t belong anywhere near the public square. as well as the truth that so many of the folks i love most dearly have chosen not to be in such a union. or have life-savingly mustered all the courage in the world to step free from one that suffocated or shattered them and the dearest ones they loved. but these days i so often find myself pondering the truth that a marriage, especially a getting-long one, is practically its own living, breathing entity. across the arc of time, it ever shifts, deepens. it’s the deepening that most captivates me, and i can only scratch that surface here. so the question i bring to the table, one for which everyone might have some answer, is this: what is it about the deepening relationships of your life, the ones that last across the years, and survive rocky terrain, dry seasons, and an abundance of struggles, what has that deepening brought you, and why is it so essential? and what invites the deepening?

happy blessed diamonds, dear A and G. xoxox

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