“Among those whom I like or
admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can: all of
them make me laugh.”
-WH Auden, 1907
A
few years ago one December, as I prepared to leave for a business trip, my
husband John (aka Kurt Vonnegut’s Mr.
Brilliant) went into the basement to install insulation beneath the kitchen
floor in our 100-year-old chilly house.
Searching
the dryer for my missing sock (always the missing sock, never the missing ascot,
a phenomenon that for years I’ve blamed on plate tectonics, but I digress), I
heard from downstairs an animal noise, a groan, a cry of sudden shock at the
pain, of mortality and surprise, of anguish and hurt. I thought John had
stapled his hand to the beam or was impaled on a rake or something bloody and bone-chilling
and nauseating like that—good imaginations for regrettable gore run in my
family; after a brief moment in which I took stock of my personal constitution
and tolerance for blood and guts, I ran downstairs, afraid of what I would find.
I
found him unable to move or speak, his face white, his arm at an odd angle like
an ice skater who can’t finish his triple lutz. I couldn’t see the problem and
he couldn’t speak to tell me. There was no blood, but worse: something I’ve
never seen—he was paralyzed by pain. [The back story: given the many late night
trips to the hospital emergency room with Daddy’s
heart
attacks, I’ve long responded to every hurt, sniffle, strained muscle, cough of
John’s with one question, the one that matters: “Are you having a heart
attack?” He has long known that this is the measure of seriousness for me, the
barometer of any emergency situation, the answer to which determines the speed
of my response, as if anything less than a heart attack doesn’t merit my moving
my head or quickening my pace. I’m only half kidding.]
A
man who has been known to perform minor surgery on himself and hardly believes
in aspirin, John isn’t prone to wimpiness in regard to physical pain, so I knew
it was bad. When he agreed to go to the emergency room, I knew it was real bad.
I knew the affirmative answer to my ubiquitous question was finally here, after
all those years of dreading it. This was that awful moment. I bundled Emma up
(Tess was gestating nicely at the moment, six months away from emerging) and
off we went to begin a process the conclusion of which we could not know at the
time.
Things
move slowly in hospitals unless you go in with the symptoms he had. Whisked
away for tests, he was then held overnight in the cardiac intensive care unit.
I brought Emma home, blithely telling her that Dad would hate the hospital food
and would be home soon, but without that surety in my own mind. We were new in
town, a month here. There were no friends to call.
And
as I stepped on the first step of the four going to our front porch, it hit me
like a punch to the gut, a sudden knowing that chilled me through, a Porch Step
Epiphany, if you will: if only John’s clothes came home from that hospital, but
not him, the laughter would go missing.
Mr. Brilliant makes me laugh like nothing or no one has ever made me laugh. And
when Emma grows up and writes her memoirs (I hope I fare well, but there was
that one incident with the pretzels), what will shine through in the portrayal
of her daddy are the lengths to which he is willing to go to make her laugh. And
I mean really laugh. Laugh to tears, laugh to stomach ache, to pleading for it
to stop. Now Tess is growing up in the same tradition of slight insanity and
belly laughs, learning so young how to create laughter in others. The term
“peals of laughter” was invented for the young; they know their voice, they try
it out. As adults, we minimize, hold in, reduce.
These
girls will long remember every birthday or whiff
of a holiday beginning with a thick forest of brightly colored streamers and
balloons and hearts cut out of construction paper that sometimes takes him hours
to create and perfect, that beautiful wooden lemonade
stand on wheels that he made for Emma in the garage out of scraps of lumber,
the giant telescope he rehabilitated because Emma so loves the stars, the trips
to the Duck Park with Tess and the long, complicated and yet soothingly
predictable stories he tells her at bedtime, the cakes with Civil War battles
recreated by small plastic soldiers, the chess sets pitting physicists against
mathematicians, the home movies of being attacked by doughnuts and ding-dongs.
By
appearing to fall asleep and snore, we used to kid him about educating us with his
long and involved (see: boring) histories of the universe. The subtle hint
didn’t stop him. He still regales us with those historical treatises, but now
does so loudly in the manic voice of Steve Irwin, the Australian Crocodile
Hunter, “CRIKEY! THROW ANOTHER SHRIMP ON THE BARBIE! THE BLOODY HUNS
ATTACKED! THE CHINESE INVENTED PAPER, GUNPOWDER AND UMBRELLAS! NO WORRIES! FERMAT’S
LAST THEOREM TOOK 375 YEARS TO SOLVE! HITLER PAINTED STILL LIFES! THAT MOVIE
ISN’T HISTORICALLY CORRECT—THEY WOULDN’T HAVE HAD BUTTONS LIKE THAT IN 1864!”
This
hilarity is a sister to the fact that he really is brilliant; John is the man enlisted
by everyone who knows him to be their “lifeline” on “Who Wants to be a
Millionaire.” He is as at home teaching Emma about building a bird house from
sticks and mud as he is talking to world renowned scientists about quarks. Who
won the Nobel Prize in 1949? Who lost the World Series in 1964? What is the
origin of the Pleiades? Who is Dirac and what is he famous for and what was his
wife’s name and his favorite color? What is the secret ingredient in Spam? Mr.
Brilliant remembers everything he’s ever read, so he knows, damn it, he knows. Poor
man has lost any chance of finding a Trivial Pursuit partner—why bother? The
only categories I have any slight hope of beating him at are those covered by People magazine.
Once
in elementary school, Emma refused to do her homework after school. “Emma,” I
said, “we need to get this done before dinner. I’ll help you.” “I prefer not,” she
intoned quietly. “Honey, you really need to finish up, and then we can play
trains.” “I want to wait,” she answered. “Let’s get it done before Daddy gets
home and surprise him!” I offered. Finally, in desperation, she told me the
absolute truth: “I have to wait until Daddy gets home so he can help me,” she
pleaded. “But honey, why? I can help you now.”
“Because
Daddy knows everything.”
Well,
there you have it in a nutshell. I’ll just sit over here quietly. Chopped
liver.
It
takes the threatened or actual loss of something to bring it into sharp relief
sometimes, most times, always. I wish it weren’t so, but it seems to be that
way, not only in love but in life. Living with a snorer? You’ll miss it when
they’re gone. Does she leave body powder on the floor near the vanity when she
uses her big poofy poof;
you’ll long for that fairy dust when it stops falling. It will be the smallest
things that bring loss into quick relief: the smell of Fahrenheit cologne, a
jar of Skippy, a matchbook from the Roger Smith Hotel, Spongebob Squarepants, a
small silver book with a scruple in it, a black and white cookie like the ones
from New York, a homemade sandbox, a box of leaves once Fedexed to me in London
because I was missing autumn at home.
The
end of the hospital story is a wonderful one, the best possible: no heart
attack, home, alive, well, and having a birthday today, a Big One, a half a
century one.
Yes,
John was born fifty years ago today in a hole in Germany. That is, he was born in
an underground army hospital. He’s loved dirt ever since, collecting it
wherever he goes, comparing the colors, tracking its feel. It seems only
fitting, then, that one of his 50th birthday presents is something
called The Dirt
Project (surprise!). After a call was put out into the universe, dirt has
arrived from nearly every U.S. state and 10 foreign
countries, from Alaska to New Zealand to Israel, from good friends and
from people I’ve never met. It just keeps coming and the colors are amazing. (Got dirt? Send some!)
So
this is all to say a wee Happy birthday, dear Johnny. Here’s to many, many more
years of craziness, long stories about the history of science that make our
teeth hurt, impersonations of Homer Simpson and of Ted Knight from the Mary Tyler
Moore show, watching Patricia Routledge as Mrs. Bucket in “Keeping up
Appearances,” wearing lit candles taped to your head, and big, big laughs, the
kind where your stomach hurts afterwards, the kind where tears come and for all
the right reasons.
~*~ 37 Days:
Do it Now Challenge ~*~
Laugh more
without worrying how you look. Tape a lit candle to your head, pretend you’re
being attacked by doughnuts or Barbie dolls and make a film of it, create
dozens of tall, odd snow characters all over the hood of your car and see how
long they’ll last when you’re driving 35 miles an hour, look at the stars with
your kids at night, teach them how the world works in a fake Australian accent,
and above all: tell them stories and laugh at their jokes and catch them when
they’re falling.
And while
you’re at it, acknowledge now what you would miss if it were gone from your
life. Then
embrace it, cultivate it, be grateful for it, tell it, tell them so.
wow, this entry made me cry. what a wonderful tribute to your wonderful hubby. i think i cried because i was thinking of the men in my life, my dad, the fiansor, the way they both make me laugh, the fact that the fiansor makes me laugh every single day. appreciating those we love is so essential. thank you for the reminder and the beautiful (as always) post.
Posted by: kat | 17 February 2006 at 12:10
Wow! Thank you that was wonderful. I have to go give my husband a big hug now.
Posted by: katkat | 17 February 2006 at 23:49
Patti, it has been a while since I laughed and cried at the same time.
Just dropped my wife off at the airport as she leaves with her sister for a few days away (she deserves it) so I can't run and give her another hug like katkat wants to do (we did well with the curbside kiss though).
Thanks again for sharing such a wonderful posting!
Posted by: Steve Sherlock | 18 February 2006 at 07:23
What a beautiful, beautiful tribute to the man you love..and what a wonderful man he must be. Huge 50th birthday wishes to him! And I just realized that I owe you some dirt! I promise I will send some--so sorry it will be late. Between birthdays and my stepbrother falling into a coma and a trip to Portland and our laptop dying and an assembly production at school and...you get the idea...I simply forgot. Hope it was a FABULOUS day for him and that the Dirt Project was a huge hit. Some Calif. dirt coming your way!
Posted by: Marilyn | 19 February 2006 at 22:49
My children are sleeping and I was just going to spend some time writing in their journals, telling their future adult selves just how completely amazing they were at ages 2 and 4... But now I have something even more important to tell them... and more importantly to remind myself of! how completely amazing their daddy is at age 35... Thank you for all your inspiration. xo
Posted by: Mary-Sue | 21 February 2006 at 16:57
beautiful. moving. evocative. y e s !
thank you. i needed to read thios. what an amazing piece of writing. thank you.
Posted by: cupcake | 11 March 2006 at 00:37
Thank you, that was beautiful, it brought tears to my eyes, in a good way:-)I am feeling the urge to hug my hubby too:-)
loved your blog.
X M
Posted by: Matin | 30 November 2007 at 21:55
gorgeous
Posted by: grace,T | 19 February 2008 at 11:47
That was Just Beautiful.
Posted by: piscesgrrl | 17 February 2010 at 21:24