My Dearest Partner in Greatness

Walking up her steps after work; her front door is open, and the screen door allows for the cross breeze through the high-ceilinged living room where she works from home. The slough of my shoes on her WELCOME! mat announce my arrival; she jumps up excitedly, as though her “working” from home in the living-room lounge chair were just a pretense. (For I know she has an upstairs office, though I hadn’t been upstairs yet.) She practically skips across the floor to greet me, a prance, wearing a smile that says you are the reason for this beautiful now. She opens the door; she jumps up and straddles me like I’ve just returned from a foreign war.

“You’re here,” she sighs into my ear.

And I sigh as well. For this, the travel was worth it, not the twenty-seconds’ stone’s throw from my office to this beautiful now, but life’s journey of misadventures and unpredictable forks down the roads-less-traveled. I embrace her in this straddle position; her legs are wrapped around me like a fastening clamp which makes the embrace less top-heavy, and I am reminded of my youngest child, Jack, the way he would greet me each hung-over morning, his smile and his giggle as he ran across the stained kitchen linoleum to take a running leap into my arms. “You are my heart, Jack,” I would sourly breathe into his neck.

Far too soon to tell her she is my heart, but even though it is nearing the day’s end and it’s been miles since I’ve gargled, I do breathe into her neck a fresh bouquet of promise. And I do feel, right now in this straddle clamp, that she feels an unfamiliar security with this evolved man who, in a relatively short span, has transformed from reprehensible sot to reliable upright; who, a mere six years prior, had been vilified, pitied, left for dead, but who today is rebuilding in “His vision” of what Man should be.

Rebuilding, the continuous: the end is nothing, the road is all I whisper more to myself than to her, knowing that I am like the river that you can never step into twice; knowing, now, because today I am present, that tomorrow’s child will be minutely more perfect than today’s so long as I continue to practice the rebuilding.

So grateful I am to have this woman to share my transformation with, for she does deserve this so.

And oh, but how about Self do I sound; ME, my favorite subject, but should it not be this way, if I am to give myself to her? Wouldn’t she not want someone who didn’t think very highly of himself, where the many negatives finally do make a positive but only when they are thoroughly thought through, and then recalculated? What woman would not want a man who can finally look at himself in the mirror, and finally smile at the reflection, not in admiration of himself but of what he has become? For this is the man, today, of the firm handshake and the direct-eye contact; the reflective thinking; the still, calm presence. Or, he is the man working towards these perfections if they are not readily present.

But of course this work is not without its goal: to make smile the woman who has transformed my life; who, with her silly little isms and her magnanimous gestures, still consumes much of my waking hours with longing, or with reverie: the adorable way she tilts her head, for example, when expressing interest in a conversation; or when she starts a sentence with umm,

Like that, keeping me waiting for something that does not come.

And I’ll say, ummm, in jest, and she’ll just kind of look at me, and I giggle inside because it’s like we’re an old couple now.

Or when I come home —because it quickly evolved into home, for us— to find her pruning, or reading, or weeding in the back yard —I still don’t get why you wear those gloves while weading, I say. Aren’t the pages hard to turn? to which she merely chuckles, now, barely obliging the stale Dad joke— and all four cats —we’d started with one, six years ago, but she’s got a way about her, as Billy Joel sang— are sitting or sprawled on the lawn or in the flowerbed around her like she is the anthropomorphic Bastet the Feline Goddess. And there approacheth I, He of the Heavy Gait, and the cats scamper, leaving the damsel to fend for herself.

“Tabitha killed a bird,” I am informed. “It’s over by the porch,” and I know she tells me this both for my information, but also for my instruction: I am to dispose of said-bird, but never am I to kill a cockroach, which I learned the first week when she shrieked from the bathroom. She was huddled in the corner and IT was towering over her, like Gregor Samsa; I grabbed a shoe and went to demonstrate my virility but she shrieked even louder, Don’t Kill It! and baffled was I, right then, and a bit miffed (in truth) for did she really expect me to be gentle?

Today when she tells me there’s a cockroach I am able to say, because of how we have evolved, don’t tell me unless you want me to kill it —she has accepted that I am brutally male— but I will tote the dead bird to the compost heap, because I do all the cooking and I therefore am responsible for composting and I suppose therein lies the connection.

But I am funny too, and she knows when to back off when, say, I’m cooking, and she gets in “my space”; or when I’ve had a long day and am not in the mood to hear about hers, she knows not to press it, not because I’d slapped some sense into her but because we, together, have patiently grown into “getting each other.”

Many years ago, I’d said to Andrew, my first born, “Son, if I were half the man then that you are today, my life would have taken a completely different course.”

“Dad,” my son replied, “if you were half the man that I am, you would have never had me.”

This journey has been one of various forks and unexpected, very dark valleys. I’d made many mistakes, and there were those who were the beneficiaries of my mistakes. Today, a forgiven man, I am able to apply all I learned to what Carl Jung calls the “second half of life,” with you,

my life,

my dearest partner in greatness.