Mother of my children, people watching, San Francisco, CA.
How do I love her? I would count the ways, but they’re countless, so all I can do instead is paste up confetti piece after confetti piece onto a pastiche-collage that will take me a lifetime to complete, and even then it will be incomplete. She once heard from a psychic that we’d been lovers many times over in past lives. This iteration was different, though. I apparently told her, last time around: this next time I will be different. You will have to find me in a new form.
And so she did. She thought she was looking for the man who would love her well and for the rest of her life, and instead she found me.
Above, we were on a date; I’d met her in town after a train ride up the penninsula from my then-job. We were about to go to the opera, one written by someone she actually sang to once. John Adams: she’d done an audition in his living room to understudy the already legendary Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in El Niño. Ah, how different our lives would be had he said, “You’re hired!” rather than “Thank you, that was beautiful.” But then again, we have two miraculous children and a home amidst rich community, and our roots get deeper and deeper every day, so am I complaining? No I am not.
Her patience is infinite, or near-. She is a better sport than anyone I’ve met, and I pray (to the extent I do pray) that our children pick some of that up, because it’s not coming from me. She is game for just about anything, and has spent a lifetime finding ways to connect more deeply and sincerely to others around her, both for her art as a performer, and because it’s where her heart takes her. She is courageous and generous; cries easily, and just as easily laughs.
She laughs at my jokes, and I count it as a day well spent when I manage to make her cry laughing, and don’t think that isn’t a peak experience. Our children watch her doubled over and crying while laughing at a joke of mine, and I think about what I watched my father do for my mother, and think: yep. Apple? Tree.
I could go on.
What I was listening to: Jesca Hoop, “The Kingdom,” from her Hunting My Dress album.
Awwww……what a gift, your love, and what a wonderful lady love you have.
🙂
And I just noticed the tricyle rolls across your header. How cool is that?!?
Thank you thank you for noticing!!
When the site got hacked last summer, and I asked DresdenPlaid to help me redo it, we got all done and there was my son on his trike. And there was all that free space to the right. And then I had recently seen Issa Rae’s site (since redesigned) that had animation at the top of it, and I thought: Eureka! My boy slides across the top, over and over again. Dresden made it happen in a nonce, and of course I love her even more for it.
Thanks for noticing. 🙂
“This next time will be different. You will have to find me in a new form.” So true, in general, in so many ways, for relationships all the time, sometimes just between going to sleep and waking up in the morning.
Everything about this is gorgeous and beautiful and aspirational and gives me hope for the world and, selfishly, my own life.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I am so happy you found each other. (Also, more shallowly speaking, you two make a gorgeous couple.)
I didn’t realize how much of a puzzle piece this could be for (me) in learning about (you), but it was an intimate glimpse and I really loved it. Nice of you to share. She is lovely, as are you.