The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

It’s hard to believe that John and I have been together for more than two thirds of our lifetimes! Wow! And it’s been a wonderful forty years, too. 

I never could have had a better husband than John. His dry wit alone has seen us through both good and bad times. Plus, he is the most considerate man I know, starting with the cup of tea or coffee brought to my bedside every morning of our married life, or–these days, when I can enjoy sleeping in with the sloth of the retired–the pot of hot coffee left on the table for me if he leaves for work before I get up.

Apart from sleeping together for forty years in a bed that is smaller than the modern double bed, we have danced together (from jive to disco to waltz); marked papers together at the same messy dining room table; cooked together (me cutting up veggies, him stirring and watching to see thing didn’t burn); watched birds together (from our own back porch, mainly); done crossword puzzles together (John coming in especially at the end to finish up the last difficult answers).

We have  driven from the tip of Cornwall up to northern Scotland and down again to Kent, without killing each other, even when we got peckish each day around teatime). We have listened to classical music together  at one point, sharing a libretto together on the same sagging sofa while Wagnerian music moved us almost to tears). We have read things out loud to one another. We have wallpapered the bathroom together twice and still remained undivorced.

We have  bought a house together, slowly, over 25 years, mortgage payment after mortgage payment, without any rich relative dying and leaving us enough to pay it off all at once; we have managed this despite interest rates of that rose from 4% to 18% over those years. We have painted and decorated its rooms, dug and planted the garden, paid repairmen for the inevitable problems with the roof and the pipes (the latter being dug up  in midwinter, in frozen ground, at our expense, of course.). We have paid off that mortgage, finally, and felt the satisfaction of being home owners. 

We have laughed and cried together with joy at the birth of our daughter. We have, together, walked and fed and diapered her when she was crying and crying and crying as a collicky baby. We have watched, helping her together with homework, booboos of all kinds and a few crazy boyfriends, as she grew into a beautiful, bright, considerate, loving person, our greatest achievement. 

We have clung together during some scary times (his brain operation, our daughter’s attack of arrhythmia, my various asthma attacks, the Ice Storm, Y2K, 911, our grand daughters’ births, my knee replacement surgery).  We have laughed together and raised glasses of  various alcoholic beverages, from beer to oozo to scotch to wine, on Pasley Island, the Greek island of Skiathos, the British Isles, and the island of Montreal.

I know I have been very lucky and yet I also know that luck was only part of this achievement, that it involved day after day of working at being married, gently, with love, faith in one another, and mutual respect. We made mistakes, of course, but fewer, I think, than many couples do, because we really wanted a different kind of marriage.

We married when no one else was getting married; traditional marriage was considered a joke (or so it seemed in 1971), so a lot of our approach to marriage came from a reaction against the traditional marriage.  This started with our tiny but beautiful wedding (which was still the best wedding I’ve ever been to!), with a $25 wedding dress and no wedding ring, no relatives present, and no gift worth more than an electric beater, and a honeymoon that consisted of sleeping in a rented car, him in the back seat and me in the front, with a tent tarp slung over the car to keep it darkish after daylight, and two cats on leashes outside meowing to get in away from the blackflies.

I swore to myself from the beginning not to ever be the kind of wife who nagged or said “Not tonite, dear, I have a headache.” I have made a point of being agreeable rather than pouting when John got drunk at parties or was late for dinner or wanted to go out to drink or play tennis with his buddies. I have made a point of being calm when he couldn’t find his keys almost every morning on his way to work. I’m sure John has had many similar things he has had to put up with concerning me, the least of which was putting up with my shopping habits (which I still swear are just typical of all modern women).

It has been one of my great satisfactions to see that our daughter has found a husband just as wonderful as John: the new kind of husband, the kind that is up to the challenge of working beside the new kind of woman– one who has both a career and a family– and not feel emasculated. When John and I got married, this kind of husband and wife, this kind of marriage, didn’t yet exist. I like to think that either we helped to invent and define such a thing, or that we rode the cusp of a North American movement toward it.

It has been a long, strange, wonderful journey. And, unless John is currently  preparing divorce papers even as I type, it happily isn’t over yet!

May 29, 2008:  

10 am.:   Since meeting with Dr. Gore two days ago, I have been taking three Lyrica tablets a day instead of two. After a month on Lyrica, I was feeling quite a bit better, but my knees were still hurting. The first day, after taking the second tablet at noon, I felt very drowsy, lay down for a nap, slept for 2 hours, and had a hard time getting up to make dinner. Yesterday, I took the pill at 2 pm, having forgotten to take it at noon.  I  shopped for groceries painlessly. I could even stand at the bus stop painlessly for about 10 minutes, waiting for a bus, carrying my heavy purse and two small bags of groceries. And when I got home, instead of collapsing or napping, I was wide awake and not weary at all. When John came home at 5, I told him that I was pretty well pain free, which was very nice. felt jazzed up rather than drowsy, and wasn’t tired even when I went to bed at 10. Today my knees are stiff, but then I haven’t done any walking yet. As for the rest of me, I feel pretty good. Which is nice.

 Hooray! Now, if this can only last!

   On April 28, 2008, I asked my doctor for a prescription for Lyrica. I did so because it was the only medicine I knew about for treatment of fibromyalgia. I had seen the ads in magazines, and although I had been a bit put off by the two pages listing all the terrible side effects–ranging from weight gain and dry mouth to drowsiness, swelling of the legs and stroke—I felt that I was at the end of my rope in terms of pain and needed to at least try this medication. After all, my other meds have certainly helped me to be symptom-free for asthma, for example, and without stomach pain due to taking corticode steroids for athritis. 

  I was despairing because, a year after my right knee had been replaced, I still couldn’t walk more than a block without needing to sit down. And I had to lean on something while walking: my ugly black cane (good also for getting a seat on the bus) or, for two awful weeks in April, my grand-daughter’s stroller, which acted as a kind of walker, but with which I still had to stop and sit on the steps of porches or the ledges of stone walls along the way (I chose ones where there was no car in the driveway, hoping that meant no one was home.)

   My legs and arthritic feet hurt so much that walking, even in orthopedic shoes, was like walking barefoot on sharp rocks, with the pain going up my leg at every step. And my left knee, the one without a new replacement, was hurting a lot, but mainly in the tissue around the kneecap. 

April 28, 2008–10 pm:  Took first Lyrica tablet before bed. I was a bit afraid, and told John that if I was still sound asleep when he left for work, he should put the phone next to me on the bed and then phone me after his class. I was worried about the ‘it might make you drowsy’ warning on the enclosed papers.

April 29, 2008, 7 am:  Well, I woke up in the night to pee and didn’t feel particularly drowsy or drugged. I went back to sleep easily, but not with a sense of being drugged. And now I’m completely awake, and have just taken my first of two Lyrica tablets for the day. Ooops! Even as I typed that sentence, I remembered that I’m only supposed to take one a day for the first week. Arrg. As far as the pill is concerned, is it my imagination, or does my left leg already feel better? 

April 29, 2008, 8:30 a.m: Am I just imagining it, or was climbing the stairs  easier just now? BTW, no sign of drowsiness. Maybe the three cups of coffee I had for breakfast counteracted that one. Or maybe I’m just not the type to get drowsy from this pill.

The Back Garden: Spring At Last?

I stand upon the filthy porch

And squint at the unaccustomed sight–

Sunshine coming through unleafed boughs–

As if I’ve emerged from endless night.

With ten degrees of Centigrade,

Plus melting snow and warmer sun,

I almost can believe it’s true,

That Springtime has, at last, begun.

Now is revealed what winter hid,

The detritus of the season’s blight:

Dead plants of brown, dead grass of grey,

A quite ironic sort of sight.

Spilled from a weathered bird feeder

Down to the waiting squirrels below,

A winter’s worth of sunflower seeds

Blackens the piles of melting snow.

Much like Atlantis, rising up

From under the destructive sea,

The patio furniture now appears

With peanut shells as its debris.

Old cat turds dot the dingy snow,

And urine streaks; some pots arise,

Shattered by cold one winter night,

Still caked with soil, to my surprise.

The cats now venture down a walk

Freed from its winter wall of snow;

They can’t believe that spring has come,

And sniff out paths they used to know.

I wish for blossoms or for buds

(While, dressed in winter black, I stare)

I wish for robins on the lawn—

But settle for this warming air.

There may be blizzards yet to come

Before the blossoms on the trees.

But my request is still the same:

“Could winter now be over, please?”

.

March Drive: Looking for Signs of Spring

A lick of green along the limbs

Of trees beside the road from town

Was all that we were looking for

Instead, the trees stood bare and brown.

The stubbled cheeks of nearby hills

Were white with snow: no sign of leaf.

The fields we saw had not been plowed

The pines stood dark with winter grief.

The sky was blue, but no birds sang,

On that Spring drive we took that morn,

How hard it was to think: somewhere,

In green fields, lambs were being born.