Now they tell me…
What if the problem with finding a house is ME?? It probably is. Can’t get away with nothin’ around here any more.
Driving into town to look at a house for rent. Why does she even want to look at that one? I rejected it yesterday without ever having seen it. That went over well: she ranted and raved, stomped her foot, and let me have it. When you get girls from Iowa stamping their feet, you’re in big trouble. I couldn’t say a thing (and didn’t try) for 20 minutes, which is fortunate. Besides, she was right.
What a paranoid sumbitch I am, scared someone’s going to say I can’t go outside and play. Everything’s a threat to my precious independence, like my wife, denying us a chance to live in a dump forever. Oh, a loveable dump, to be sure, the perfect bachelor pad, best place I’ve ever lived. Driving into town to look at a house for rent. God, the sky is beautiful! Dark blue over Taos Mountain with lightning bolts, brilliant sun and white clouds overhead. Eighty degrees and I’m cool in my long sleeves. Makes it hard to be an idiot.
We didn’t rent the place — too awkward, no wood heat, etc. — but we prowled around the neighborhood. My wife is pulled there. (This is big medicine, bastards beware.) The woman is a creature of wild unleashed passion and joy hemmed in by negativity and big smelly men. I for one spent years of my life holding her down out of madness. It didn’t work, and she’s still with me. I’m not just lucky, I’m obscene.
Driving back to Llano Quemado after latte and chai in Taos Plaza. My partner is blazing sane, friendly, and tuned in. (How do they DO that?!?) Despite this, I’m still eating broken glass from last night’s dressing down. I’ve been forgiven (in effect), she’s miles ahead, but I’m a bastard without an excuse, averaging two syllables per mile. When we get home, she goes off to practice the piano, and I take a nap, otherwise known as all I can manage without being tasered.
Cocktail hour under the elms. I look at the mountain and drink my tequila. She walks back from her studio all smiles from playing Bach, goes into the house to change her clothes, and comes back out with a glass of wine. I pour myself some more tequila, and we clink glasses. Usually one or the other of us makes a toast, but I’m not talking. Still touching her glass to mine, she leans in close, pulls her sunglasses down just far enough to drill me in the eye, and says, “You take a long time, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” I reply, turning away and downing my shot.
Later I will put on loud Cajun music from the 1930s and microwave burritos from Antonito while she makes a salad. I am lots less crazy but the weight of me has slowed us down. After dinner we have three chances to catch Callie the studio cat and blow each one.
It’s 2:00 a.m. now. Time to zap the last half-cup of coffee and answer email, order hard drives. Moths are beating against the window glass, welcome to America.
Comment by Carmel
11 July 6, 2008, 9:15 pm o'clock |
I can’t speak for ‘women’ K.J., only for myself. I don’t think of ‘men in general’, but of particular men. My experience is that personality is a more critical factor in relationships than gender. Sometimes female acquaintances have said, “You know what men are like” in describing something their husband has done. But the men I’ve had close contact with don’t have that particular behaviour.
Maybe I’m a-typical of my gender. I have, on the whole, closer relationships with men than with women. I don’t belong to ‘women’s groups’ - I prefer mixed company. And I HATE those gatherings where the sexes separate into groups.
But back to ‘compromise’. I’m using my dictionary definition (admittedly it’s an AUSTRALIAN dictionary, and may differ from an American one
“a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an adjustment of conflicting claims, principles, etc, by yielding a part of each; something intermediate between different things”
The danger here is that if important parts are yielded, one or both parties are dissatisfied, and resentment may fester. One wants to live in the mountains, one near the sea. Somewhere in between just doesn’t cut it.
The dictionary goes on, and here it gets interesting:
“an endangering, esp. of reputation; exposure to danger, suspicion; to make liable to danger, suspicion, scandal etc; endanger the reputation; to involve unfavourably.” (aha, the dictionary knows what I’m talking about!)
Let’s take a simple example regarding the purchase of a car. Recently my husband and I were thinking about new cars. (We didn’t have money for a new car so the example is benign.) My preference is for red or black, both of which my husband consider impractical, the first because it’s ‘flashy’, the second because it shows dust. His choice would be ’something that doesn’t show the dust’, which is pretty boring from my point of view. Being (ahem) ‘mature’ we tend to focus on the thing we BOTH want, in this case, the MAKE of car. We went to look at new Hondas and Peugeots in a car sales yard. I was. needless to say, on the lookout for an ‘interesting red’ which my husband might not consider so flashy. But then we both saw it … a marvellous dusky grey-purple such as we didn’t know existed. We both LOVED it … better than what we THOUGHT we wanted.
Sometimes the 3rd or 4th or nth way is harder to find, but it’s there. All it needs is the will.
In a perfect world anyway
Comment by K.J. Webb
12 July 7, 2008, 3:19 am o'clock |
Words are slippery, but, as Ekiot said, “to talk to you I gotta use ‘em”. Yes, the C word has these different senses, and those senses colour each other, but the second sense isn’t the one we mean in this context. No more than when we say someone is “boring” us are we saying he’s drilling a hole into us. We humans make those distinctions between the different senses of words all the time.
The first meaning seems to me to describe very well what you and your husband did about the car in that neither of you got just what you wanted in the first instance and were willing to give up your first preference and go looking for something else. That “something else” doesn’t have to be in-between in all cases. If I liked “Harry” as the name for my first-born and my wife liked “George”, a compromise on that point wouldn’t be “Gary” or “Jorge”. No, it’d be to move on to something else. That decision itself would be the compromise. When you went looking for a colour you could both live with, you did that. Is it possible that somewhere in that exchange somebody “gave up” something? Is it possible that gray purple represents some midway choice between your preferred flashy red and your husband’s dusky beige. Some things are measurable mathematically (the compromise of a law suit, say, where one side says the claim should be $20,000 and the other says $10,000 - just split the difference and make it $15,000), some things - typically things in the esthetic realm, like the names of children or the colours of a new car - are not.
And here’s another thought about that decision: You both felt happy about it, I surmise, because you liked being able to make the other happy. That’s the way it’s supposed to work in a good marriage. That little concession to your mate made you disposed to like the second choice when it came along so fortuitously.
To me this all sounds like a classic compromise - a word that at least has a dictionary meaning. A phrase like “third way” doesn’t “mean” much but has a lot of hope and good feeling clinging to it largely because it’s so vague. Isn’t that kind of why an optimistic person like you who wants to feel good about things likes it so much? Whereas, me - well, long ago there was a television series called “Dragnet” in which Sergeant Joe Friday (my namesake, Jack Webb) was fond of saying, when people gave him fancy explanations that didn’t quite add up, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Yep, that’s the ticket.
Comment by Carmel
13 July 7, 2008, 4:52 pm o'clock |
Nope. None of that. Remember, we weren’t even buying a car. There was no need to make anyone happy. We both instantly LOVED that purple car (and if anyone had told me in advance that I’d love a purple car I’d have thought they were nuts), and in the moment of loving we weren’t to know if the other liked it or not. It could just as easily have happened that one developed a lust for purple and the other for lime green (ahem).
I think you’ve missed the point and the opportunity. ‘Third way’ means plenty to the adventurous.
This could go on forever, but alas, I have to go and try to figure out a way to buy a purple car.