Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down

It was the best of times. It was the worst of the time. It was my best decision; it was your biggest mistake. It was fantastic. It was unreal. It was something I never knew was a good thing until it was gone. It was a twentieth century marriage – the perfect imperfection.

When I stepped onto the plane in London, England, taking me to visit my father in Toronto, Canada, I had no idea that I would return a married man.

The passions that snatched me from my single life and opened a door to the robust culture of America were both magical and devastating.

Magical, because my Christian upbringing had impressed on me, from an early age, that good things only happen to people who die and go to heaven.

And devastating because I was thrust into the world of America, where I became a black man for the first time in my life at twenty-nine years of age.

I had been living in Aberdeen, Scotland, for four years, the British oil capital of the North Sea after returning from West Africa. The two years that I’d spent traveling and living in West Africa had made living in London impossible.

I’d developed a laid-back attitude from my time in Africa. And having broken the spell that bound me to that city on the hill, I’d created options for my life, which I now wanted to pursue.

After a stint on an oil rig, and a year in a music store, I teamed up with a fellow Englishman in an antique pine furniture restoration business.

The work was hard, cold, and grueling. It involved working in a dank warehouse, up to my elbows in joint-debilitating water-filled caustic soda, used to strip paint from the pine furniture.

In late November, we concluded a deal with a client in Calgary, Canada, to ship him a container of English antique furniture to Canada. The client still owed money, and we hoped to develop a long-term relationship with him.

That year was a particularly bitter winter. Aberdeen endures the most harsh, persistent North Sea arctic winds that penetrate even the hardest of clothing. So, with business slow, it was an auspicious moment for me to spend some time with my father, who lived in Toronto, Canada, and whom I’d never met as an adult.

When I met my father, Fitzroy C. Dawkins, I found an individual whose warmth and affectionate nature quickly made up for the years of separation. Happy to be a listener, I soaked up the infectious excitement that poured out him as he regaled me with stories of Jamaica and his life in Canada.

For ten days I never left my father’s apartment. My father breathed a new life into my through his stories, which I welcomed. I recognized that, even though my father had not been around we both shared an ironic humor and self-parody.

My father was an intelligent powerful man, who was confident about who he was and what he wanted.

In anticipation of travel, I applied for and received a multiple re-entry visa for the U.S.A.

I had no desire to live in the United States at the time because I had a business a home and many friends in Scotland. Like all travelers who enjoyed exploring the world, I recognized that crossing the Atlantic was a terrific opportunity.

As it happened, my father took me to New York City for Christmas, and I was able to meet my father’s friends from Jamaica and Panama.

I visited Harlem and was made conscious that my English accent made me stand out. I was lucky on several occasions to remove myself from some very threatening situations, when black people in the stores discovered I was a foreigner.

My father’s Jamaican friends, in New York, told me about how they always left the lights and radio playing whenever they left home, on vacation, for fear of being robbed.

After three weeks of dutiful attention to my father, I reminded him that I had a business obligation in Calgary, Canada.

By chance I called some English friends I knew from London, who were now living in Santa Cruz, California.

We had a great chat, and my friends invited me to visit them in Santa Cruz. I was happy to hear from them, but I didn’t take their invitation seriously.

On the train to Calgary, from Toronto, a trip that normally took a day-and-a-half, one of the train engines broke down. For the next three days we trundled across the tundra at half speed.

Fortunately, some fellow passengers were from Quebec, who, unlike the normally gentile Canadians, were boisterous party people. They, along with the free alcohol the train operators gave everyone, because of the delay, turned the trip into an exhilarating and fun time, despite the inconvenience of the train losing its power and heating.

By the time the train pulled into Calgary station, I was having such a fun time with all my new friends that I wanted the trip to go on for a couple more days.

My clients, Paul, and Margie Johnson, were, like so many Canadians, super nice and patient. They had waited for a day and a half for the train to arrive and quickly took me to their apartment in the city and gave me a home-cooked meal with wine as I regaled them with my adventure.

Some of the antique furniture we sent in the container had been damaged on the way over from Scotland, so I spent three days resolving the shipment issues and finally concluded our business.

Paul and Margie gave me the balance of what was owed, and after a phone call with my partner back in Scotland, I decided to take a trip to California to see my old friends whom I hadn’t seen for five years.

I bought a round-trip ticket to San Francisco, for a week, and then onto Toronto, the day before I was to take my flight back to Scotland.

I met Melody, my wife-to-be, two days after you arrived in California. A week later we were married, and two days later I was back in Aberdeen running my business and waiting for Melody to join me.

They have an expression for this kind of impulsiveness in Trinidad: ‘He’s a Too-Tool-Bay-Boy!’ A rough translation is that the woman had possessed the boy’s precious fluids. This was certainly my situation. I was besotted with the lady.

Even after many years of separation, I did not regret having acted on my feelings. I was in-love, and my wife was the most intelligent and beautiful woman I’d ever met. My impulsive action seemed quite natural to me, and her reciprocal response confirmed the reality of our union.

When people look back at the breakdown of any kind of union, it’s tempting to look for blame. We all want to ease our aching egos and heal the hurt of disillusionment. The truth, however, is usually more subtle and intricate.

Consider, for a moment, how we get married. It has been said that love is the most irrational of emotions. George Bernard Shaw, an Irish writer of distinction, described marriage in these terms:

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously ‘til death do they part!”

Marriage is the most important commitment people make in their life, yet society has no way of training them for this most vital function.

The nature of what a good marriage consists of is rarely even discussed, let alone supported in society today. And for those who have passed the test of time and made a ‘good marriage,’ there is no social recognition.

Added to this indifference is the pundit’s campaign against marriage. Tabloids, Movies, and TV shows feed us a steady diet of sexual infidelity while dramatizing how boring sexual stability is.

“Love will find a way,” croons Lionel Richie, and we pay homage to love as a necessary condition to our lives and marriages.

Unfortunately, love is not always sufficient by itself. We need more. We need trust, friendship, partnership, courage, and a lot of luck. We need to build love and marriage, because ‘Love and happiness’ take a great deal of effort, compromise, dedication, and good fortune.

During our initial separation (I waited in Aberdeen for six months before Melody joined me), we filled pages and pages, confessing our love for each other. Our love, we declared, would be the perfect marriage.

We committed our undying love to each other in passionate romantic prose, determined from the outset to cast aside the dragons of jealousy and competition.

And when we were united finally, we complemented each other with our shared interests: traveling, reading, jogging and movies.

Neither of us were money hungry; we ate well, dressed well, threw lovely parties, and were the envy of our friends because of our outward show of compatibility.

What went unseen and unsaid was an understanding of each other’s true natures and characters. What were our priorities? How would we manage role playing? How prepared were we for compromise? What about children? What did we understand about money? How comfortable were we talking about sexual intimacy?

You can know someone for years and never really know basic things about them. The confident, cigar-smoking Englishman hides a deep insecurity. The vivacious social butterfly is too worn out for her husband when she gets home.

And how do you deal with someone who doesn’t lift the toilet seat? Or cap the toothpaste? Who puts the toilet paper on the roll with the front side out? Or someone who doesn’t hug?

These and countless other tedious, petty, irritating, and very real differences become the substance of our marriages. Their resolution, in whatever fashion, is what we call a successful marriage.

If a failed marriage can be called a success, ours was a success. Six-and-a-half years of commitment and learning did not just evaporate into the air. I learned that I could make a commitment and remain faithful, and that I needed to be around touching, intimate people. I also realized that building a relationship takes time, patience, and compassion.

Like many men, my relationships with women had been primarily as sexual partners. After my marriage, my relationships with women were ones built on mutual respect and admiration. I now saw compatibility, where before there was conflict and competition. And finally, I realized that you never know a good thing until it’s gone.

Love is a perfect imperfection, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, whenever love comes in your direction, don’t you hide away, don’t you hide….