I still marvel that I’m qualified to write about relationship longevity.
Everyone wanted to date me because I was cute, but for most, once was enough. Apparently, I was intense—a nice way of saying sort of scary. I don’t feel like trying to explain it. You’d have to ask them. But somehow, a great miracle happened in Chicago:
Tomorrow is Pat’s and my 15-year wedding anniversary. Fifteen years legally, as wife and wife, and nearly 34 together. When I met Pat, I figured I wasn’t ever going to find anyone who would get me and love me for life. Including Pat.
Pat looked like a British royal to me when I first saw her at Or Chadash, which was Chicago’s LGBTQ synagogue (and she still does). Shabbat services happened on Friday nights at the Unitarian church on Barry because the church wasn’t in session then.
We said hello, but I was afraid I wasn’t accomplished enough and Pat was scared she wasn’t young enough. Eighteen months in, a fun night disarmed our fears.
After Shabbat services one Friday, a small group of men and women, including Pat and me, decided to go to Big Chicks. The bar featured painted murals of Rubenesque women.
Pat and I were seated across from each other at a big highboy table. Pat was being her most hilarious self and for a microsecond, I scanned from her eyes and mouth to the red Polo logo on her black polo shirt. Or was I peeking at her chest? Years later, Pat told me that she was emboldened that night after she clocked me looking.
I’ve told this story before, but I had despaired of meeting anyone anywhere, including Shabbat services, and so I signed up for solitary entertainment—a weekend rental of a TV and VCR from the Rent-a-Center near my apartment at Argyle off of Sheridan. I had also rented several Blockbuster VHS videos.
At Big Chicks, I invited everyone over to watch one of the films, “Jungle Fever.” Only the three women, including Pat, said yes. I ran into the galley kitchen and washed a big cluster of green grapes and set it on the floor in a colander, turned on the movie and the four of us sat side by side on my frameless futon. To convert it into a quasi-couch for the show, I shoved it halfway up the wall.
The seating arrangement turned out to be Pat, then two women whose names I don’t remember because they didn’t come to Or Chadash routinely enough—and because I wasn’t focused on them at all—and then me.
We all hugged goodbye that night, but Pat’s hug jolted me. It’s hard to remember that electric current three and half decades later. After graduate degrees, cat parenting, promotions, moves, layoffs, mothers’ deaths, cancers and sundry illnesses, triumphs, passionate avocations, including nurturing animals, trees, and writing, there’s a lot that physical desire has to climb over to reach us anymore.
After last week's hospital-bout for an obstructed bowel, it's even harder to take myself seriously as an object of Pat's desire anymore, but apparently, our love can outlast the grossest of gross times.
I don’t have to explain our enduring success as a couple. I’m reminded of an Elvis Costello song, “Such Unlikely Lovers:”
There were no magic spells You can keep the flowers and bells They just don't seem right Can it actually be? Me and you and you and me Though we're like day and night
We are like day and night, except with the same values, which gives us a lot in common after all. Our love is both still mysterious and prosaic “till death do us part,” which I hope is a long time from now.
