Becoming One and Offending Squirrels
For me, the event that best symbolized the nature of marriage was the combining of my wife’s and my music collections — merging two separate entities into one. Robin had her CDs. I had mine. The notion of “our CDs” was so foreign to me that it seemed unfathomable. When I was in college, we had “our couch” and “our TV” and even “our washer and dryer,” but CDs were, in my mind, inherently unsharable. They belonged to someone. When Robin and I moved in together, I entertained the idea of keeping them separate out of a sense that anything else would be ludicrous. But then I realized: O holiest of holy cows, I’m no longer just me; I’m half of us. I made myself ready.
“I’m going to combine the CDs,” I told Robin. She was sitting on the couch at the time, which two burly movers had just delivered amongst much sweat and grunting.
“Okay,” she said.
I detected a lack of enthusiasm, a sort of fundamental disrespect for the ceremony of the moment. “I’ve got mine,” I said, pointing at two large boxes of jewel cases. “Where are yours?”
She leaned forward and rummaged through a box at her feet. After a minute, she handed me two CDs. One was the Grease soundtrack, which I had bought for her because she loved it. The other was The Smiths Singles, which I had bought for her because I loved it. Truth be told, renewed access to Singles was the one thing keeping me calm. Once our collections were merged, I could listen to it whenever I wanted.
“I am now going to mix them together,” I announced. “They will no longer be ‘yours’ and ‘mine.’ They will be ‘ours.’ Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
I took a deep breath and laid her two CDs on top of my two hundred plus. They looked pathetic and lonely.
“Let me know when you’re ready to bring the mattresses up,” she said.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Robin was much less awed by the whole marriage thing than I was. I was, in fact, intrigued. As the day drew near, people started to ask me if I was nervous. I wasn’t. Their repeated inquiries slowly convinced me that I probably should be nervous, so I started taking their suggestions and became a basket case.
The big day finally arrived. Like most modern couples, we decided to crap on tradition in the interest of convenience, so I was able to see my bride before the ceremony, during a session with our extraordinarily sweaty photographer. I was amazed. I’d seen wedding gowns before, and I’d seen women in them before. But this was my girlfriend. In a wedding dress. My girlfriend in a wedding dress. I was stupefied; the import of the moment was incredible.
“My girlfriend,” I told her, my eyes wide and amazed, “in a wedding dress. I can’t believe it.”
“Duh,” she replied. “It is our wedding day.”
Again, that disrespect for ceremony. I knew I was in for an interesting ride.
Flash forward a year and a half. We’ve got a house, a dog, two cats, four horses, and two mothers who keep asking us where the grandchildren are. We tell them that we’d be happy to produce some if they’d pay the expenses. Suddenly, they stop asking. We’ve got two fathers who, being men, don’t see the big rush. They score silent victories when we play the financial card.
Robin made the transition easily. Though not a party guy by any means, I had a harder time. It seemed to me that I should be hanging out late. It didn’t matter where; it just seemed the manly thing to do. I have since adjusted and now, along with everyone else our age, we are discovering that we sit around more and go to bed earlier. Like a fortunate few of these people our age, we have embraced it. 11:00 Friday night… Yow! Getting to be late! Our pleasures now take decidedly lamer forms.
Like last weekend, when we went through Toledo on the way home for Easter. We stopped off at The Anderson’s. The Anderson’s, for those of you who aren’t Toledoans, is what you would get if you took Meijer or another superstore, fed it large amounts of amphetamines, and then really pissed it off somehow. As we strolled the aisles and marveled at the extent of the store’s holdings, Robin went into a frenzy.
“We have to buy a pineapple!” she announced.
We took our pineapple and continued wandering. An aisle filled with hundreds of microbrewery beers. Shelving units. Doors and windows. Vast rows of gleaming white toilets. Past these, Robin darted into the pet supplies aisle and began looking through birdfeeders.
“For the cats!” she announced. Since I knew that the cats would likely not eat birdseed, and since I didn’t think she was so macabre as to suggest using it as a death trap, I surmised that she intended to hang it in front of the window to attract birds for the cats to watch. The feeders were around $40 each. I was opposed to the idea but was eventually swayed, seeing how excited she was. We bought one called the “Squirrel-Be-Gone.” The tagline was, “The feeder squirrels hate!”
I’m not kidding.
Since it did seem to be a birdfeeder (instead of a poor choice of squirrel feeder), and because Robin found it attractive, we took it to the checkout along with our pineapple. I can only imagine what the checkout girl thought.
I hung it up yesterday. I have seen no squirrels, so apparently it works pretty well.
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