Real Joe

Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there. – Anne Lamott

That’s one of the better definitions of grace I’ve come across. It’s from Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith which is one of my writing coach’s reading assignments. It’s a collection of personal essays, many of them written when Lamott was a columnist for Salon.

Grace and Lake Superior are synonymous for me.

We’re heading up the path along the Cascade River, where the root beer-colored river drops in a series of spectacular cascades just a few hundred yards before it empties into Lake Superior.

“Remember when you were so impressed with me that I could make a fire in the woods in the pouring rain?”

“I do. I couldn’t believe it. Those were the best hot dogs I ever tasted.”

I’m pleased and imagine that now, thirty years after we hiked this trail as newly in love, she’s still impressed.

I’m snapping pictures of the two of them with the boiling cauldrons for backdrops.

I jokingly say to my daughter, “Hey, let me get a picture of you walking across that log over the river.” My wife recoils in sincere horror at my suggestion and suddenly I’m 10 years old, climbing a tree in the woods behind our house, delighting in my ability to freak out my mother by climbing way higher than she’s comfortable with.

I don’t do anything dangerous but I know exactly how and where to climb so that it appears to my wife that it’s dangerous. She keeps expressing concern and eventually goes over her edge when she thinks I’m encouraging my daughter to climb in dangerous areas. She slumps down on a rock and tears well up in her eyes. “This isn’t fun for me. It’s not how I want to spend the day. I want to go back to the car.”

The full awareness of what I was doing and the cycle we got caught in now hits me and I figure we’re now in the Land of the Fucked for a while. I know we both we’re dancing but I took the lead and so I’m disgusted with myself. Sonofabitch, you’d think after all these years, I’d be a little more mature than this. I wonder if the rest of this little hike is going to be quietly tense between us, and it occurs to me to say a little — I don’t know — a prayer, I suppose. “Help me see what I could do to turn this sucker around.”

“I’m really sorry. I got caught up in an old pattern and didn’t realize it. I won’t do that anymore.” It’s all I can think of. And then I just shut up and wait, sitting close, stroking the pant leg on her jeans. She relaxes after a few minutes and we move on.

The river flattens out as we head upstream. My wife and I find a place to sit and poke at the weird little worms clinging to the rocks under the water while my daughter wisely gets some distance from us. In a few minutes, she’s hopping from boulder to boulder in the river, looking for a way to make it all the way across in the icey but shallow rapids. I grab my camera to document the attempt, with an eye on my wife to see if she’s worried.

“I like doing that kind of stuff” my daughter says to me after successfully completing her over-and-back crossing. “A little scary but not really dangerous.” She’s wearing a big pleased-with-myself grin, and my wife gives her a high-five smile. And then one for me, too.

Wise kid, I think. Hope some of that rubs off on your ol’ man.

* Land of the Fucked – one of many great lines in Anne Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies: Some thoughts on Faith.

Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there. – Anne Lamott

That’s one of the better definitions of grace I’ve come across. It’s from Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith which is one of my writing coach’s reading assignments. It’s a collection of personal essays, many of them written when Lamott was a columnist for Salon.

Grace and Lake Superior are synonymous for me.

[Last Sunday] We’re sitting at our table in our tent trailer at Lamb’s Resort Campground on the North Shore of Lake Superior, about 80 miles north of Duluth. We got a great spot, literally twenty feet from the rocky beach, about 50 yards from the water.

We’re washing down the campfire S’mores with some hot chocolate, playing a game called Phase Ten which I’m about to lose again, much to the delight of my wife and daughter. The wind off Lake Superior has just switched to the east, foretelling a change in the weather from the 3rd day in a row of sunny warmth. Rain’s probably coming but this wind means waves which is why my wife wanted to come up here. She needs a little wave therapy for her tinnitus.

My daughter goes outside to roast more marshmallows

so I give my wife’s arm a tug so she’ll slide over for a snuggle.

“We got a lifetime of experiences like this ahead of us”, I say. “And soon, it’ll be just the two of us.”

“Mmmm, yeah,” she purrs. “And maybe there’ll be grandkids at some point.” Always the mom, I smile to myself.

A perfect time for me to lay it on her. “If life had a rewind button, I wouldn’t use it.”

“Mmmm, that’s a really nice thing to say.” She snuggles in closer. I say a little prayer of gratitude to Norm but on Monday, I fess up.

“I knew I’d heard that line recently,” she laughs. “It still worked.”

See the intro to Scene 1 for an explanation.

Scene 4: The B&B

It’s New Year’s Eve, our 23rd anniversary. We’re scooting around town together, picking up items for our overnight stay at a local B&B, complete with a hot tub and fireplace. Bottle of wine. Sourdough bread. Some fancy-ass cheese and chocolate. A video. All her idea.

She’s wearing my favorite dress, the dark velour one that shows her shape. “I feel like a sausage in this thing,” she says, half-heartedly complaining. “But as long as I wear a winter coat in public to hide the bulges, I’ll do it. For you.”

She’s also added a few other touches that have me on the way to a moon I’ve not been to in a long time. White nylons. Dangly earrings. Slightly heavier eye makeup than usual. Painted fingernails. And knock-me-out perfume.

We settle into our room and she plucks a couple of small gift-wrapped boxes out of her suitcase. “Open these now,” she coos. More chocolate? Gift certificates? Theatre tickets? The atmosphere tells me no, but I’m grasping for a clue.

I open the first box and my jaw hits the fucking floor. Lingerie. Box #2? More lingerie. Really interesting lingerie.

She laughs. “Are you surprised?”

I don’t know what to say. I must be happy because I can feel my face smiling but I’m struggling to get out from under a shitload of emotional cargo that’s just fallen on top of me.

I recover.

And after 23 years, we have a honeymoon. Our first of many.

We’re headed home, back in Duluth right now. I brought my Palm Vx, keyboard, and Norman’s digital camera so I’ll post some pics and a couple of short essays when I get back.

I thought I could get online in Grand Marais on Tuesday where the local library had Internet access, but all the 15 minute reservation slots were booked up.

See the intro to Scene 1 for an explanation.

Scene 3: Kitchen

I yank the burner grids off the kitchen stove and sprinkle some cleaner on a scrubby to work on the baked-on grease spots. Garth Brooks is lecturing me on the stereo with “Somewhere other than the night, she needs to know you care” but I let him get away with it because a few cuts later I’m in fantasyland when he transports me to a farm field with “the sweat, the moonlight, and the lace.”

She sneaks up behind me and puts her arms around my waist. “Thanks for phoning me on your way home from work tonight to let me know you’d be late. I love it when you do that.”

“No problem,” I lie. It actually was a big decision that I mulled over for ten minutes in the miserable traffic.

“Oooh, you’re doing the stove!” she coos. “The kitchen’s looking so spiffy these days.”

If she’s buttering me up, I don’t give a shit because her affection has me twitching.

She’s not. “I really hate cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. It’s a big relief for you to take it on.”

I curb my basic instincts and keep my hands occupied with the scrubby. Foreplay suddenly has a whole new meaning in our budding love affair.

I’m at the Browser’s Cafe in Duluth, on my way (with my wife and daughter) to a campground near the Temperance River on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Just a short camping trip… back home on Wednesday. I’ve got some essay scenes queued up to post, but I’m not sure I’ll find access anywhere. Not a bad problem to have.

See the intro to Scene 1 for an explanation.

Scene 2: Farm

No TV. No music. No computer. No kids. We’ve secluded ourselves for three days at a friends’ weekend hobby farm.

As we sit on some floor pillows, cold drops of armpit sweat trickle down my sides. I thought I was relaxed about this expedition to the depths of my precarious marriage but my body’s telling me that I’m near the top of a rock wall overlooking the Baptism River Falls on Lake Superior, hanging on by my fingertips, not knowing how to prevent sewing machine legs so I can make the final five yards to the top.

We start arguing about kids, money, housework, all the usual. After a long silence, I blurt out, “I’m not happy. I don’t like the way our marriage is right now. I don’t want to go on like this.”

“So are you saying you want a divorce?” she says with fearful tears in her eyes.

“No. I just want to figure out how to make it better. I don’t know where to start but it’s no good like this.”

After a long silence, I say, “I ache to see the desire for me in your eyes. Where did it go?”

My body startles me again, this time with tears, then sobs. I don’t know what is going exactly but my ol’ man is lurking in the shadows, telling me that I’m now basically fucked since I’ve turned into a sniveling idiot, a wimp of the first degree.

But before my defenses can kick in, she reaches for my hand. I assume it’s pity but my body’s signaling something else so I don’t run. I listen. She tells me how her fire went out. My motorcycle affairs. My dismissal of her being overwhelmed with kids and housework. My disparagement of her pleas for more closeness. My working all the goddamned time.

I tell her that her parenting tone and cold shoulders have made things worse. She just listens. No yeah-buts thrown back at me this time. We settle on the caught-in-a-vicious-cycle theory of marital deterioration. I say, “What can we do?”

And then she shocks me. “Well, for starters, your vulnerability is a total turn-on.”

I can’t believe my ears but one look in her eyes and I see it. My ol’ man beats a hasty retreat.

If life had a rewind button, I’d never touch it. – The Norm

“The Norm” cartoon for today has this great line to try out on your sweetie this weekend, assuming you mean it. I’ll try it and report back, but unless it’s a really romantic moment, I probably won’t get full credit since she reads the strip regularly.