Dinner, with love

My parents met while they were in undergrad at the University of Detroit. At the time, my mother was still in the convent, and the two were classmates – casual acquaintances, and nothing more.

Four years later they re-met at a teaching convention. My mother had since ditched the constraints of a white habit and veil for a more relaxed wardrobe of miniskirts, heeled oxfords and gravity defying frosted hair that poofed out and fell to her shoulders in black and gold waves reminiscent of a sexy skunk.

Due to the financial limitations of a private school teaching salary, my dad could only afford one can of Coke for the two to share on their first date. I happen to find that quite romantic.

When the two married and wanted to start a family, it quickly became apparent that they couldn’t do it unless they made more money. My father started working part-time as a salesman at a Ford dealership to supplement their income. Later, he left teaching altogether and sold Ford cars full time. My mother stayed home with us kids and we had a very happy, very traditional upbringing.

It didn’t occur to me until many years later, what a huge sacrifice that was for my father. My mother, too. My dad taught biology and math and would often tell us stories about taking his students on a trip to Europe. He loved teaching so much that even after working a full day at the dealership, he would take the time to try and help me with my math homework. I was (and still am) terrible at math. I am ashamed to admit that I wasn’t too grateful for his help and would often get so frustrated at my inability to catch on, that I would say, “Dad, that’s now how they do math now!”

On Mondays and Thursdays my father wouldn’t get home from work until 9:15 pm, after the dealership had closed. On those nights, my mom would make up an extra plate of food that she would cover in plastic wrap and heat up in the microwave once he arrived. She would sit with him at the table, while he talked about his day. He would always ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’ over his meal, even if it was the simplest concoction, simply because my mom had made it for him and he appreciated it.

My husband is an attorney who, thankfully, doesn’t often work the crazy late hours his profession is known for. But in this highly unstable and uncertain economy, no one is safe and no job is guaranteed. I admire many things about my husband, but one of them is his ability to ‘hustle’. He is not one to sit idly by and let ‘whatever happens, happen’. This attitude manifests itself in many ways, but lately he has been putting his energy toward projects, connections, and new business plan ideas. The end goal is, as it always is, to bring financial stability and peace of mind to his family. His family is, at the moment, Duncan and I.

He has had to work late a couple nights a week over the last month due to meetings or business prospects. What this means for me, is that I take the train home from work, saddle up a crazy and energetic Duncan, and trudge out into the snow to take him to the park for a half hour or so of activity. I come home, defrost my hands and feet, feed our four-legged child and then make dinner. Usually, on the occasions that Dave is working late, he grabs take-out or finds some other means of acquiring supper.

But twice now he has come home late, full of stories but an empty belly. And on these nights, I warm up his dinner while he loosens his tie and tells me about his day – the good and the bad – his hopes for us, his plans, his ambitions. I pour him a glass of wine and sit with him while he eats his dinner. His dinner of homemade barbecue chicken pizza that I have re-heated for him with love along with a fresh side salad.

And as I heat up his meal – his meal that, truth be told, HE made two nights ago in anticipation of this late meeting, knowing that I am not the greatest cook and would be left to my own devices which would mean a dinner of either ice cream or cereal - I am reminded of my mom and what she would do for my dad every Monday and Thursday for so many years.

And while we don’t have children and I did not ‘technically’ make this meal for him, the love is there, as is the support and the care and the feeling that we are a team and always striving to do what is best for this team.

And not to toot my own horn, but – well, I did make the salad. I may not be the best cook, but I make a mean salad

Fruitful Vines

The average vine growing an average grape varietal lives 66 years.

Moreover, it grows not naturally, but trained. By this I mean that nothing inhibits its growth. In fact, its growth is fostered. It is first planted in enriched soil and often surrounded by a milk carton to shield it from evening cold and allow it to grow straight. It is watered and fertilized and assured good health.

Once it reaches a certain height, the vine is attached to a trellis. That trellis will train the vine upward. Here, it can better receive sun, water and life. Once it grows again it will be bifurcated by a caring farmer who will take one part of the vine and trellis it to the left, and the other trellised to to the right. The grapes grow in these distinct arms to bear gads of fruit such that nearly each section can produce enough fruit to provide one bottle of wine.

Without training, the vine would not produce nearly enough. It could not receive sun or water or be harvested correctly. It may, in fact, just be for the birds. And no one wants an expensive and highly potentate vine to be bird food.

And so it goes when your habits are not received in the silence of being solo but to an audience of one that may or may not applaud what you do whether you do or not.

Leaving shoes on the mat no longer is without consequence, leaving work out clothes to hang while they dry conveniently in a guest room, unfettered bourbon consumption, the NFL Network and the production and performance of household chores journey from the province of knee jerk inconsequential dictatorship to something akin to a settlement negotiation. Such is the trellis.

If I can watch games today, you can watch the Bachelor tomorrow; if I make dinner, you can clean up; if I take Duncan out, you can take him tomorrow. It is not a burden mind you, just the dance of two very good friends that also happen to be lovers and who (by the way) have dedicated their lives to one another.

When two people become one, each become each other's growers. They nourish, they shield, they watch and they hope. That can be harsh when it is cold and good when it is warm. The fog can roll in at night or during the day, no one can know. But, the astute wine lover knows that the unpredictable combination of warm and cold produces the best grapes as they climb the trellis.

But much like each vine grows to produce more trained than they ever otherwise would, so do the marrieds. They grow, they get harvested, they lay dormant, and they grow again to repeat a cycle that is more productive than had they been allowed to ever grow alone without training and without harvesting.

I concede that I have become lovingly trained. Not in a puppy way, but in a way that refreshingly reminds me that it is not just me anymore, it is much more. And as I enjoy the growth, the harvest and the dormancy (it is winter), I wait and I wonder how much I will produce knowing that it will be ever so much more than I would have had I just remained uninterrupted on a football Sunday.

As I watch the Golden Globes.

The Name Game

From the time I was old enough to understand that when a woman marries a man she then takes his name as her own (age six), I’ve been pairing my name with a long and colorful history of surnames. This always depended, of course, on whom I happened to be crushing on at the time. In first grade it was Brian Van Horn.

Carrie Van Horn

In 3rd grade it was Adam Yatooma. Carrie Yatooma. (Sounded like “Carry a tumor.” Ick.) Later it would be Carrie Green, Carrie Frederick, Carrie Frank, Carrie Mansfield, Carrie Hanton. These imagined ‘new names’ would fill the pages of my spiral notebooks, my private diary, my secret heart. I would say the name aloud in various ways (in private!) and giggle at the sheer possibility of it. Although I could see every romantic detail of the wedding: the dress, the cake (of course), the shoes, the flowers, the bridesmaids and the bouquet toss, the most important and romantic part of getting married (in my adolescent mind) was the name change. The idea that a man could love you so much that he offers you his name…well it’s terrifically romantic, isn’t it?

But as I grew older, I grew more superstitious of this ‘name game’ of mine. Considering my track record (none of my adult relationships lasted longer than 2 months), I vowed I would neither scribble nor doodle my first name with anyone’s last name until such time as I had an engagement ring on my left hand or some other tangible and obvious sign that a marriage was eminent.

And so I plowed ahead…meeting men and dating men and not thinking a bit about their last name – or at least trying not to. But I noticed something. As I watched my girlfriends and female family members marry, a new and alarming trend seemed to emerge: most of these women weren’t taking their husbands’ names. Whaaat? How could this be? Surely these women had day dreamed and played ‘the name game’ as I had. What happened?

Some cited ‘professional reasons’. Others had lived with their name so long that to change it seemed, well, a betrayal to who they were. Some chose to compromise by hyphenating their last name (a’la Meredith Baxter-Berney – well, Meredith Baxter now…hrm… bad example). One former coworker combined her last name with her husband’s and both took on that name, and another pair of friends decided they would both completely abandon their last names and adopt a new name entirely, taking inspiration from their favorite jazz musician, Miles Davis.

That’s all fine and good and to each his own and blah, blah, blah. But that is neither fine nor good for me. And I was happy and pleased to hear my husband say (when I brought up the subject of changing my name) “I love you and I support whatever you would like to do…but I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t be a tiny bit disappointed if you didn’t want to take my name. I have waited my whole life to share everything with someone…including my last name.”

(Hrm. I now wonder if my husband has spiral notebooks and journals from his adolescent years covered with the first names of a variety of girls paired with his own last name. I’ll have to ask him later…but I’m willing to bet that he does! And that only makes me love him more.)

So. Fast forward a bit. We get engaged, we go through the exhausting, exhilarating, stressful and ridiculous ordeal of planning the wedding. We get married. And in a matter of weeks, * poof * I have completely changed my name.

I have thought long and hard about the meaning and symbolism and the reason for changing my name. Yes, I love my maiden name. But I love what taking on this new name means. It is truly important to me. We are now a team. A united front. There is no confusion for the mailman or relatives – Duncan’s daycare place or our future child’s teachers. He is the Mr. and I am the Mrs. Changing my name to his does not mean that I now hide in his shadow or somehow bury the woman I was before him. It is a gesture of commitment – and though many may see it as old fashioned and out-dated, it has only ever seemed natural and right to me.

And so I say my ‘new name’ aloud and proud (and often). And though it may not bring on the same giggles as when I was a girl, I do feel a profound feeling of gladness and gratitude at the reality of it. Recently, I called to make an appointment with a new stylist to get a much-needed haircut. After spelling my full name and repeating it for her, she remarked, “Wow. What a lovely name.” I nearly gushed in my giddiness, “Thank you! It’s new! I just got married.” (Ok, so maybe the name change does make me feel like it did when I played the name game as a girl…so sue me!)

But then the oddest thing happened. Though saying my new name was as easy and natural as breathing, I realized with alarm – I didn’t know how to sign my new name. Suddenly I felt like I was learning to write with a pen for the first time - with my left hand. I found myself accidentally signing my maiden name, or worse – once, while signing for some groceries, I misspelled my new name. Luckily it was so garbled looking anyway, that only I knew, but still. How embarrassing!

Now I'm thinking that perhaps I should not have been so hasty to abandon my habit of scrawling all those imagined ‘new names’ on the pages of notebooks. If I hadn’t, perhaps I’d be a bit better at writing my married name now.

Well, thankfully I have a lifetime to practice it.

Nighty Night

Sleeping when you are married takes on a whole different meaning.

And mostly in our house, it first involved a queen bed. I cannot conceive of this now that we have stepped up to a bed that is best described in width as prairie-like. Our bed is so large, in fact, that when we moved into our new condominium we wondered how, or if it would get up the stairs, through a door and where it sits now, comfortably next to a radiator that is always off because it just gives up too much heat.

Our bedroom is not big but it is not small and since we have no central heat, we switch back and forth from a summer formation in which the bed is parallel to the three window panes that make up our Bay Window (to accommodate our window air conditioning unit), to our winter formation in which it is perpendicular to our window. But, lest I digress.

My wife has several habits that make her have a good night sleep. I have one: bourbon, and maybe bourbon and wine.

Her first critical ingredient to a good night of sleep is that of ambient noise. I find this particularly fascinating because before we were married, I had thought people looked for a quiet place to slumber. But they do not, they look for one in which there is a constant stream of noise from something like an air purifier, air humidifier, a fan, a window unit air conditioner, a small jet engine, a small car, a blender or the various drunks that roam our street at night singing anything from Biz Markey to The Spinners.

Ambient noise takes on these forms in loud ways to me. The air purifier, for example, has four settings that range in noise from hush to loud. My wife picks loud, then I pick hush, then she picks loud. Ambient noise, she explains, keeps other noises out and occupies her so she can fall and stay asleep; while she wears ear plugs.

My wife also has back problems. She has mild scoliosis. Her spine leans to the right and left. Mine does as well and I have also been diagnosed with the same condition. I can only imagine this will mean we will appear on some sort of telethon after year 2 of the birth of our first child.

To remedy this problem, she uses a body pillow. A body pillow is a longer version of a regular pillow that is harder and less restful than a regular pillow and consistently intermingles with your pillow so that when you fall asleep, you feel it get yanked away from your head so it can be used as a body pillow. The body pillow is but one ingredient of my wife’s pillow flotilla. She surrounds herself with not one, but then two other pillows such that she could float from Havana to Miami simply by latching all of them together with palm fronds.

As she sleeps, each of the pillows revolves and moves. So the bed moves.

There are two more ingredients. One, my wife needs the alarm clock next to her without exception. Two, she needs her back scratched every night. When she does so, she asks me in a little girl voice to “do it good” (more on the little girl voice later on in our blog).

The alarm clock being next to her means that she sets it before we go to bed. It is quite endearing actually, having your wife know what time you wake up on different days or o sweetly ask you “what time, sweetie?” Never having had that before, I gush at the mere though of it. However, there is an accompanying evil to the alarm clock being on her nightstand; sometimes she sets the alarm and resets the clock.

I first noticed this when I woke up one morning really, really tired. I walked out into the hallway and saw our dog, Duncan, who usually rushes into bed once he hears the alarm go off, simply look at me confused as if to say – “Dude, what are you doing?” I ignored him, brewed coffee, showered and shaved, and came into the kitchen where I looked at the stove to find that its clock read 4:45 a.m. Confused, I looked at my phone to confirm the time and sure enough, I had risen a full 1.5 hours early.

As to the back scratching, I kind of like it. However, I get concerned because my wife has very fair skin and I fear that my nails will literally make her bleed. But they don’t, and it all works out.

I am not a very good sleeper. I blame this on genetics. My father, brother and sister all share in arising early in some form of panic about work, the house, kids, jobs, money, dusting, you name it. We really should all just call each other at 3:30 nearly every morning; we could all catch up away from all the sounds of the every day.

But on those occasions when I do wake up, I look over and I look at the person next to me. My wife. I mean, she chose to be with me out of everyone else. And, I am crazy. She is angelic, so peaceful and resting completely oblivious to the outside world and warm and cozy in her bed.

Until the alarm clock pierces the noise of the humidifier at 4 a.m.