A Classic Blog Post from Almost Five Years Ago: 'My Wife Cheats on Me'

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

My Wife Cheats on Me

I can't trust her. Our agreement was, since we spent so much money taking her 93-year-old mother around Scandinavia in September, that there would be no gifts this anniversary and no gifts this Christmas -- indeed, a general cutting back on gifts as far as the eye can see -- until we pay off the debts suffered (and in my case all debts are a matter of suffering) on our trip.

Last Saturday was our wedding anniversary. How commemorated? No nothing, not even a meal out. We would have had a meal out, but piling a meal on top of a huge Thanksgiving -- a meal which is still trailing leftovers like a particularly gorgeous comet -- seemed more sentimental than sensible. Now, we did go to the symphony, but that was an accident, a coincidence from our buying a season subscription: "Here's some money. Send us some tickets for whenever."

That is how I buy my symphony music, which on one hand must cause composers of music now alive to tear at their hair, since see the philistines for whom they must compose! "Yeah, whatever you got. I'll listen." But on the other hand if too many composers of music now alive persist in composing music no one particularly wants to listen to, then I am not their bane, I am their godsend. "He don't care," says the girl chewing gum in the box office. "Send him some tickets for that thing where they don't even play, they just sit there and mope, shifting in their chairs, which creak to contrapuntal effect."

Off point. I do tend to go off point, always taking the rant less traveled by (and that has made all the difference).

We went to the symphony but not in a spirit of celebration. If the symphony had not followed so close to Thanksgiving, we would have had a delicious post-symphony supper at the Top 100 Bay Area Restaurant! half a block from the symphony's doors. We have done that before, and it is a wonderful -- if dyspeptic -- experience, since how delicious, how almost naughty, is the idea of a late supper after expensive live music, what I call peacock music since it is performed by men in handsome tuxes and women in various kinds of drab and inappropriate dark clothing. It is cruel and wrong that female players of classical music do not have a default wardrobe choice that displays them to advantage!!!

I'm ranting again.

Since it was: a) so near Thanksgiving; b) so comparatively near to that great hemorrhage of coin called Mama Visits the Herring People, we did not tarry at the Top 100 Restaurant for a late supper. What a glum evening of subdued pleasure.

So on Sunday my wife gave me an anniversary card. So sweet: "All my love from your tango girl." And on Monday she gave me a fine Italian sweater. "I was just walking by the store," she said, "and you looked so nice on Saturday night in that other fine Italian sweater I gave you last Christmas."

She cheats. I'm a bastard.

No no, says the wise reader: You're a stupid bastard and more than that you're a lucky bastard.

Posted by ....J.Michael Robertson at 10:08 AM 2 comments Links to this post

Practice: We're Going to Do an Audio Slideshow in Class from Scratch on Monday. So the Aim Today is Speed, Not Elegance.

The restaurant is actually called the Terrace Room. As I say above, one really needs a script.

Not Bad. Not Bad at All.

Today we celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary by going out. E. is off to Florida shortly to see the sister who is her 97.5-year-old mom's caregiver through a hip replacement. We needed some calm before that storm, so we didn't eat in and invite.

It doesn't seem as if we've been married 43 years, though that particular statement suggests we've had other 43-year-long experiences by which to measure, and this experience seems different.

Not the case at all. I suppose we mean that we imagine that the weight of the passing of time should have some special metric, that duration must effloresce some sort of incremental meaning, that somehow it does not feel as if we have been together that long even though we are not sure just how that feeling should feel, that we still have much to learn about each other and procedures to work out and treaties to ratify, that the sense of relish is still fresh, that the well of pain and wonder is not dry.

I don't know. We have been married a long time, and I still remember the first time I saw her -- walking away from me with a superb articulation of her constituents of motion that seized my attention and caused my lizard brain to bark at the moon.

Which is a considerable image. That of a lizard. Barking at the moon. Everything starts somewhere, and if it keeps going, why second
guess?