Monday, March 12, 2012

Goes Without Saying, Too Much


Here is Wife, holding Boy at a cookout this past summer. Not much has change since then, except her hair is shorter and she's about 5 months pregnant with Tormey #2.

Being in the doldrums lately because of the job and a lack of time to write and a lack of money and blah blah blah, I bought a book today to lift my spirits: Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.  It's doing an OK job of scattering the dark cloud from over my head, so I recommend giving it a read, but I just crossed a passage I would like to quote. The heading of the section is "Marry Well."

"Who you marry is the most important decision you ever make...Relationships are hard enough, but it takes a real champion of a person to be married to someone who's obsessed with a creative pursuit. Lots of times you have to be a maid, a cook, a motivational speaker, a mother and an editor--all at once...Good partners keep you grounded."

Do they ever. As mentioned above, I've been in a dark funk lately, but even if that wasn't the case, I'm no picnic. And the lovely lady in the picture above actually signed up, in front of a state official no less, to deal with that for as long as we both shall live...if I don't screw it up in the meantime.

It's a busy life we all lead. It is way too easy to forget to appreciate the people who give more than they take. These are the only kind of people worth knowing.

When Osama Bin Laden was killed, I scoffed at the "we should at least recognize that a fellow human being was killed" arguments offered amid the celebrations. Not that I was fond of the celebrations (too tacky) or that I'm a fan of state sanctioned murder (that's what it was). For me it boiled down to simple arithmetic. Bin Laden only took from life--and I mean "life" in the collective sense of the time we living humans are all sharing on this planet at this very moment--and for someone who took so much to have so much taken from him was only fair. It was not a moment of tragedy or a cause to rejoice. It was a brief opportunity to be satisfied that, for an instant, the debt to the house was paid.

What is tragic is those people who give, and give, are not rejoiced, are not noticed or recognized for what they do. So I am taking this chance to share in this public forum that Wife does more for me that I could ever do for her, not that she would ever believe it. She's the kind of person who actually enjoys giving presents at Christmas more than getting them. Need I say more? Yes, yes, yes, but this is already embarrassing her, so I'll cut short and say what it is I do not often enough:

Thank you.

I owe that to many more, countless, but to her before all of them.




2 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this John. Its a good reminder to hold out for someone whose right. It is so tempting to settle.

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