Happy 15th & 34th Anniversary to Pat & Me

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.

 

250 Words - Day 2

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Time-traveling from the U.S. to Israel to the U.K. and Back

What a great world that I can have on cross-country skiing, white-on-black, silver reflective gloves, a gray and raspberry wool hat, tortoise-shell sunglasses, a raspberry down ski jacket, and be mounting the foothills of the Watchung Mountains in Montclair, New Jersey while listening to Israeli music from the '70s that I used to play in our living room in Stamford, Connecticut from my older sister Deb's records...and it's coming to me from Cambridge University on a podcast of a show called Kol Cambridge!

"Yo Ya" by Poogy began as I reached Pat's and my garage door. I entered the code, tossed my sunglasses onto the front seat of my car and felt like an eight-year-old dancing around the house again. Never really knew what they were singing, but felt cool just by listening, and dancing to it. No one had coined the term "air guitar" yet, but they were the right group to pretend to play with had I been at all inclined.

The album was "Sipurey Poogy"/"Tales of Poogy" and I've just looked up the group on YouTube. I'm listening to "Hamakolet"/"The Grocery Store" now. When I was a kid, and now, I thought they might be singing "Kita Gimel"/"Third Grade" at one point in that song, and Kita Gimel was the grade I was in then. I loved the rest of how the tune sounded. The lead singer had a deep, sexy voice -- and for much of the song simply told a mesmerizing story. It was rap of a sort.

"Yo Ya", though, really transported me. I have tears in my throat as I listen to it again. I had no idea how life would be nearly 40 years hence when I first heard the song. The only really sad part is that my dad (z"l) is gone. Otherwise, I'm happier altogether than I was then, if a little bit less uninhibited. Then, my dad was unemployed and we nearly moved to Tehran, so that my dad could build a toy factory, but fortunately, that didn't work out. I felt unsettled during that period in any case, other than escaping into great music of the day, including Poogy.

During my hike, today, in 2012, Kol Cambridge played another song by a group that was popular when I lived in Jersualem in 1985 and '86, at 20, Mashina. The song differed from the hit I knew, which was "Rakevet Laila Le-Kahir"/"Night Train to Cairo". When I hear "Rakevet...", I think of the on-campus club, Bar Aton, where we danced on Friday nights; it was all that was open on Shabbat, and I've written here before that Arab townies routinely asked us to let them come in to the club with us, which we did, since anyone without a Hebrew University student ID had to enter as a guest. It was pure fun every Friday.

During the last blocks of my walk this evening, I was thinking that love and power are complicated, that is, my love of Israel is complicated, and power is a potential corrupter in anyone's hands, including in some bored Israeli soldiers' at checkpoints and a number of rich Palestinians who live in Ramallah; an author I met on a plane back from Dallas confirmed so in her book, which I read after meeting her, *Fast Times in Palestine*. I never knew how unconcerned a number of upper-class Palestinians were about their less fortunate comrades, according to the author. Her name is Pamela Olson and she may still be in her '20s. She's a Stanford Physics grad who happened to land in Palestine after a jaunt in Jordan during a post-college trip to see the world. And we agreed that whatever one's politics, that part of the planet is somehow addictive. It just is.