O
thrush, your song is passing sweet
But never a song that you have
sung,
Is
half so sweet as thrushes sang
When my dear Love and I were
young.
William Morris (1834–1896)
I've drawn twice in this blog from a memoir I wrote about Helen
and me after she died [1,2]. The memoir was meant for our children,
its contents mostly family lore and photographs, not designed to be of much
interest to anyone else. Yet those
two excerpts spurred enough response to show me that what I wrote has more
general appeal. I shouldn't have
been surprised—much of the purpose of writing is to share thoughts and feelings
with possible strangers, especially when the writing crosses between
generations. It re-assures the
younger among us that they are not the first to feel as they do, that there
truly is nothing new under the sun.
So I'll dip once again into the memoir, this time into the
chapter about Helen's and my courtship, which was prefaced by the verse above. For those who know me now as an
octogenarian, to read that I once was in the throes of love may challenge the
imagination too far. I had an
advantage in reading William Morris' poem: it froze him in time for me as a
young swain, not the aged writer he became. Perhaps strangers who read this essay will likewise be able
to see me in my thirties.
I first saw Helen in 1963 while I was ringing a doorbell:
not exactly her, but her partial, backlit image, mottled and ambered by an
antique glass door pane. It was
like an Impressionist painting, soft-brushed and romantic. The image is still with me, fifty years
later; I can even now feel my heart skipping a beat. She smiled as she opened the door. Beautiful blue eyes, I
thought. Flashing smile.
We exchanged a few insignificant words, and I watched as she
went down the stairs, on her way out from visiting my cousin, with whom I was
to dine. I’d rarely felt as
engaged as this on a chance encounter.
I remember asking myself,
"Could this be the One?" I was 33, no
youngster, so I was amazed by my gushiness.
I wheedled Helen's telephone number from my cousin, and soon
dated her, anxious to know if my first impression was accurate. It was. She was lovely, vibrant, a little wacky. She wore her hair rolled up behind her
head in a French bun, severely accentuating the beautiful bone structure of her
face. Her nose had a funny twist
in it, the result of a skiing accident, I later found out. She smiled with her whole face,
wide-mouthed, her eyes laughing too.
As we exchanged information about each other, I thought It’s
like we’re from different planets. Maybe
opposites really do attract: magnetic north
and south poles, electrons and protons.
I was from the megalopolis of New
York City, she from a small town in Utah.
I was Jewish, she Mormon. I
was scheduled, organized to the point of rigidity, always—except perhaps after
a few drinks—reserved and uncomfortable with small talk. She was
impetuous, unscheduled, people-oriented. I was an engineer, mathematically
analytic; she a psychologist, immersed in the understanding of emotions. Mars and Venus.
Many dates later, those differences spawned an inevitable
first argument. Never much bound
by the clock, she kept me waiting for the better part of an hour as she
prepared to go to dinner with me.
I, a devoté of Chronos, ran by the clock. My annoyance showed— even if it hadn't, the psychologist in
Helen would have sensed it. The
date was a disaster. Helen,
incensed by my unspoken animus, blew up at the end of it, throwing back at me
the earrings I had given her some weeks before. I was stunned by her vehemence.
Weeks went by without a word between us. When we did talk to explore our rift,
Helen asked if I was afraid of anger.
In fact I was, as I was afraid of most emotions. I had learned well from my family that
spoken words take on a life of their own, never to be recalled, always hanging
in the air as a ghostly reminder of the sometimes regretted emotion that
launched them. Helen's family, when
they were angry, had at each other, then made up, the venomous words
disappearing as if never spoken.
“Don’t you know that expressing anger, getting it out of
you, is good?” Helen said. “What’s
worse: bottling anger up—leaving it to the other person to figure out if and
why you’re angry—or expressing it so as to leave no doubt, and then working it
out? Who benefits from keeping
feelings to yourself?” My response
was, “Who benefits from speaking hurtful words without first thinking about
them and perhaps suppressing them?”
That interchange, I more and more understood as our relationship
developed, characterized our different psyches.
Given the polar extremes of our personalities, I agonized
about whether to propose to Helen, trying—true to form—to be scientifically
precise about my feelings. On one
side of the scales I placed the many ways in which she and I differed; on the
other side I put my growing love for her. In the balance, was a life-long commitment
tenable?
In the end, rational analysis didn't matter at all. One evening, after a romantic dinner, I
looked into Helen's eyes and could see in them the question, "When are you
going to ask me to marry you?"
Thrushes sang in my ears, and I blurted out my proposal over their song.
I imagine that bookies would have given
long odds against our marriage being successful, and certainly there were
naysayers among our friends and families [2]. But sometimes, when strong magnetic
north and south poles meet, they clamp together so tightly that they can't be
pried apart. And so it was as we
melded during our 34-year marriage.
Again, always looking to literature for the right words, I can do no
better than the Bard:
So
we grew together,
Like
to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But
yet an union in partition.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Act 3, Scene 2