On mistakes and marriage
In honor of a favorite poet
What is objective truth? What is subjective interpretation? And if you’ve been married for a while, don’t you grapple with these things sometimes?
“Oh no! she died?” I say.
“Who died?” says my spouse Janyce.
We’re in the living room on a Sunday morning and I’m sitting on the chair facing the window, scrolling through Facebook on my laptop. Janyce is on the couch reading the Sunday paper.
“The director of the poetry conference I went to a couple years ago,” I say, as I’m Googling her name for more details. I find an obit. Cancer. Stage four. Diagnosed in March.
Photo credit: Poetry by the Sea
“Wow I can’t believe it,” I say. “She was only 60 and from the sound of this poem, also newly divorced by a year.”
A poem came up right away in the results when I Googled her name: “A Crown for the Divorcee at Fifty-Nine.” Her poems are rarely autobiographical, but it seems that this one might be. The obituary called her husband of thirty years, “her son’s father.”
I read the whole poem silently to myself. And then I went back to Google to look up her husband. I was curious about this poem and her breakup. I concocted a whole story in my head about their divorce, about how they must have been from two different worlds even as they both taught at the same University together. He came to academia late. His first career was as a web designer and he only had a few pieces published in academic journals compared to her extensive CV with pages of accolades and achievements. She had a brilliant career she built herself and nurtured over her lifetime. And then he went and found someone younger, and less accomplished, and he left her. After 30 years.
“Kris, you don’t know that any of that is true,” says Janyce.
“I know I don’t, but I want to hate him anyway. I’m invested in my story right now.”
A few days earlier, I was up at 3:00 am washing dishes at the sink. I was annoyed by everything: the jeep was back in the garage even though I had asked, “Could we just leave it in the driveway for a while?” there was a growing pile of boxes on the back wall, dog items left on my potting bench, and then I found the dish cloth in the dishwasher with the dishes. I grabbed the cloth and flung it in the garage with the rest of the other items and slammed the door.
By 5:00 am the kitchen was clean, the coffee was made, and Janyce was up. She walked by me in workout clothes while I was drinking a cup of coffee and staring into the mirror in my bathroom.
“I finally got a better toothbrush,” I said, gathering up the packaging I had left on the sink the day before.
“You did, huh? That’s nice honey,” said Janyce.
“What does that mean? Why do you say it like that?” I said.
“I’m so glad you have a new toothbrush,” she said.
“Really, you’re going to be patronizing about my toothbrush?” I said, while following her into the kitchen. “I think I’m in the right about this. It’s science. This toothbrush has the correct angles so you can get at every tooth, and the bristles are soft. I’ve had bleeding gums for weeks using the politically correct bamboo handled toothbrush you bought with the stiff bristles. I should be making fun of that.”
“Kris, it was just a joke,” she said. “You know, you seem to be more angry lately, you notice that?”
“Yeah maybe. I’m just tired.” I said. “I didn’t sleep much.”
I don’t know why I’m so riled up about the toothbrush. It’s easy to be angry about everything lately. But if I’m being honest, sometimes I can’t stand us extreme liberals. Even as I count myself as one. Working in academia means a certain moral superiority about being educated, and we fling around our trendy jargon about all that is happening “in this moment” and how we’re all “pivoting to our new normal.”
When I was doing research for a masters thesis in the humanities I had a realization about the process, about how you come to the work with a preconceived idea and then you find the evidence to support it. If you are lucky, some objective truth in the text will change your mind and you’ll discover something truly novel. But more often than not, you end up artfully convincing yourself and others of something you already believe.
What is objective truth? What is subjective interpretation? And if you’ve been married for a while, don’t you grapple with these things sometimes?
I often recollect an early scene in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Love in the Time of Cholera when the married couple took years to get past the one serious argument of their long marriage. He pointed out to her that there was no soap in his bathroom and he was washing without it for days, and she, deeply humiliated of course, that she had left him without soap in his bathroom as was her duty as his wife, insisted that there was. Both of them were so staunchly on their position that to admit they were wrong was no longer possible. He eventually got tired of sleeping in the other room and gave in first though, admitting that of course there had always been soap in the bathroom. But they both knew that this wasn’t true.
What I’ve observed from a lifetime of reading poetry and literature is that we humans are deeply flawed. We are all flawed despite whatever we insist is the righteousness of our own position. The reason I love Janyce so much is because she will nod in silent agreement with me when I complain about how I’m not losing any weight, “Look my Fitbit has registered 10k steps for more days than not and I still can’t budge even a pound,” I will say. She won’t ever mention the brownie I’m also holding in my hand and eating even as I speak the words.
It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking coffee and still thinking about that same sonnet crown I read last week. This part in particular:
That’s why they say the story needs revising.
All the sad tropes one more time. Your friend has said
That one day you wake up and love is phasing
Into something else. Not that you understood.
Not that you thought the whistling trees, in quiet,
Were more than their sweet sound, a new disquiet,
Because you have to live the story through.
Rest in peace, Kim Bridgford