Izaak Jansz. de Wit, after Wybrand Hendriks:
Echtpaar in een boeren interieur
[Couple in a farmer's interior] (1794)

" … we continue forward somehow."

Some dates seem to attract events. My father and nephew were, for instance, born on the same day/month, January 15, and that became an annually celebrated anniversary greater than the simple sum of two birthdays. My first wife's younger sister was born on Norwegian Independence Day, Syttende Mai ("Seventeenth of May"), elevating that anniversary into a super holiday for that Norwegian family. What one says on such days tends to be the same, ever older stories, grown perhaps even more remarkable with each retelling. For the Muse and I, September 15th must undoubtedly be our most prominent anniversary. It's the day we met twenty-seven years ago, and it carries ever greater nostalgia and significance with each passing year. This year, additional significance attached itself to the day when The GrandOtter, The Muse's granddaughter Sara, gave birth to our first great-granddaughter, making us both great-grandparents.

Such significances always seem unlikely, though double occurrences cannot be described as rare. They carry a larger-than-expected probability that only mathematicians can adequately explain. To the rest of us unwashed, these convergences seem strangely significant, proof of some divine presence if not necessarily an equally divine purpose. It's hard not to feel blessed when considering alternatives, and such considerations inevitably become a part of the story recounted every anniversary, an Anniverse. Where but for fortune would we have gone? Where but for that fortunate convergence would our separate paths have led?

My first flash of recognition of The Muse was when I noticed her teetering atop a chair, carefully placing cards on top of a planned eight-foot-tall house of cards. She was a participant in a workshop I was teaching, one advertised as focusing on developing leadership skills. Amy had been sent to the workshop for her own good by a well-meaning boss intent on helping her discover herself. And there she was, poised atop that teetering chair, unselfconsciously being herself. She asked me how many courses she had to go before she reached her goal of an eight-foot tower. Her team had fled to an adjoining room from the larger one where three other teams had been assigned the same problem. Her team wanted to avoid the other teams copying their superior techniques. I carried a yardstick expressly to help each team gauge their progress, so I lent it to one of her teammates, who commenced measuring. He quickly determined that the ceiling in the room the team had fled to measured seven feet, eight inches.

Once they'd determined that they couldn't possibly succeed at their challenge, the most remarkable shift occurred. They began building faster. They started negotiating the meaning of a foot. Could they use Amy's, for example? The theoretical physicist on the team wondered if it might be good enough if they could prove that they could have succeeded had they been in a room with a taller ceiling. They continued building until several minutes after the designated time allotted for the exercise. Later, in reflection, the team members confessed that they'd somehow created a microcosm of what they were facing back home. The Muse admitted that she had been leading a project mustered to answer whether her company could accomplish some objective. It had been evident for some time that the answer was “No!" yet the project had continued as if it had been mustered to achieve the impossible rather than simply answer the question. Her marriage had likewise stalled along an immovable barrier. She'd created and inhabited a little model of her life in that House Of Cards exercise. I was a witness.

Six months later, The Muse had quit her job, divorced her husband, sold her dream house, and moved to Portland to take up with a one-horse consultant to create a business that would go on to inform and define us. We hold September 15 as the first day we might say there was an us between us. Now that us has become more than merely obvious. We might be more us than individuals, more together than separate. We haven't so much lost our identity in our relationship but discovered a context within which our identities seem to thrive, whatever the contention. We sometimes refer to ourselves as The Bickersons because we superficially disagree on almost everything. But we don't take the disagreements all that seriously. We usually make fun of them as if we weren't supposed to agree on much.

Each year, a slightly different version of our origin legend gets recounted to whomever might be present to hear. It still seems a remarkable convergence, divinely guided. It seems, in retrospect, as if someone had pre-written the script and we had just been playing parts, inhabiting roles, but that sense underplays the genuine peril we faced around that convergence. We were never outwardly desperate, but had we known the true scope of what we engaged in and the eventual ramifications, we should have been frozen in anticipation's headlights. What Grace protected us from premature realization? What beneficence insisted upon keeping us ignorant so that we could forge new existences upon the ragged tails of what had come before? We retell the story, the Anniverse, each anniversary, a little different every repetition so that we each might experience fresh realizations about the miraculous nature of our continuing shared experience. Freshly minted great grandparents now, we continue forward somehow.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz