When you marry, you marry the whole person — not just the parts above the waterline. You get both the silk sails and the barnacles.
Kat is the most energetic person on the planet. She has two speeds: full throttle and fast asleep. Born without dimmer switch or brake, she’ll do two loads of wash, walk the dog, dash off a dozen e-mails, and clean the kitchen in the morning before I can muster the energy to grab the cup of coffee she’s stealthily delivered to our bedside. She is the queen of multitasking. She is a woman who not only knows how to work hard but does. So it is not a far-fetched notion to imagine she’ll continue that hummingbird pace with a tool belt on.
Building on a lake inclines one toward boat analogies. And it’s like this: When you lash two boats together, you don’t just join ropes, but sails and anchors as well. When you marry, you marry the whole person — not just the parts above the waterline; you get both the silk sails and the barnacles.
Kat and I were launched from two very different piers. Kat’s father was sixty when she was born; mine was half that age. I was born at the start of the baby boom, Kat toward the end. Kat grew up in the rural town of Bemidji; I grew up in the white-collar suburbs of Minneapolis. Kat’s father was a jack-of-all-trades who built a house single-handedly when he was seventy. My dad was a patent lawyer; his most ambitious home improvement project was changing the washer in our kitchen faucet, and that with mixed success. Kat’s mom was wonderfully reclusive; mine, the extroverted owner of a small dress shop. When Kat was in her early twenties, she was a hard-driving Tupperware saleswoman; at that age I was a hard-partying hippie carpenter.
If you were to graph our lives and lifestyles, you would see them zigging and zagging in divergent directions, until they intersected in 1993. And while my graph lines began veering a bit more toward the calm and conservative, Kat’s veered a little more toward the loose and liberal. Our lines and lives crisscrossed, on bicycles, on just the right day, at just the right speed, on a rain-slick rural road — enough serendipity to give a man religion.
We met on an MS 50 fund-raising bike ride amid a throng of three thousand. Kat was riding with her two daughters, Sarah and Kellie, and I with my son Zach. Halfway through the ride, it started raining. A few hundred riders massed under a canopy erected as a rest stop. Zach made some small talk with an outgoing woman with short hair. She and I exchanged pleasantries; waited for the rain to let up; then, at our own paces, headed out. We passed one another and parried and feinted for a few miles. Kat’s daughters continue to maintain Kat was first attracted not to my personality but to my rear view. Eventually this woman and I fell into a comfortable, conversational speed.
Since our paths would never cross again — we lived forty miles from each other, on opposite ends of town — we told each other our life stories; the good, the bad, and the ugly. She was refreshingly honest; actually, refreshingly everything. By the time we pedaled under the arc of balloons at the finish line, I was plotting ways I could make our paths cross again. I’d been studying the literature and had ascertained that women of a certain age liked men with (1) hair, (2) a job, (3) therapy, and (4) at least a year of divorce under their belts. I was feeling in the high-percentile category.
I was over forty, with heavily oxidized dating skills. I’d dated way too soon after my divorce and in doing so had already thrown one relationship under the bus. In another misadventure I went on a blind date and, while having coffee, got hit in the head with a rock propelled from a lawn mower across the street. I went on another date with a woman who had a PhD in making men feel small. I should have taken a hint: my lot in life was to live a life of lonely celibacy — with a helmet on.
But I connived a way to see Kat again. It was still in the days of film and snail mail. I took a picture of Kat, Kellie, and Sarah, then wheedled out her address and phone number to send her copies; in this digital age of e-mail we might never have seen each other again.
The future walks a tightrope made of dental floss; good and bad things happen every day without rhyme or reason. A butterfingered tenant puts an air conditioner in his apartment window above the pet shop the moment you go in to buy a chew toy for Bobo. Or an angel in biking shorts — one who after a decade of up-and-down dating had decided she was perfectly happy without a man in her life — stops to get out of the rain at the exact same point in time that you do. A thousand things could have scuttled our meeting: a flat tire, a five-mile-per-hour-stronger wind, a wrong turn, a different pace.
The leap of faith Kat took in marrying me is the leap of faith by which all others are measured. It was Evel Knievel-esque. I wouldn’t have married me if I were me. I’d been a single dad for over a year, and my housekeeping skills were all garnered from the Jed Clampett Book of Etiquette. I was the fun dad. On birthdays we’d decorate cakes with skyrockets and set them off — in the house. We had a Mexican hammock suspended in a large doorway off the living room. We had a basketball hoop mounted high on a kitchen wall where we’d play H-O-R-S-E with a grapefruit-size basketball, calling shots like “bounce shot off the refrigerator door” and “hook shot over the light fixture.”
It would be blasphemy to call my cooking skills “skill.” Because I was a single dad, we were tight on money and did most of our shopping at Sam’s Club. We’d buy forty-packs of Bagel Bites and jars of peanut butter that required two hands to lift. Most nights I’d get home at 5:30 and try to wedge in a meal before a soccer game or concert. Even today the bar is set dangerously low in terms of what my kids consider a “great dinner,” since their point of reference is Wonder Bread with Velveeta melted over it.
Because of other factors above and beyond the presence of the basketball court in the kitchen, the house did look, maybe even smelled a bit, like a gymnasium. For the first eight months of our separation, Nanny (my ex) and I “bird nested.” We each kept a separate apartment, then alternated living in the house every three or four days while the kids stayed put. With the divorce imminent and our kids’ worlds in turmoil, it seemed the least they were owed was this stability. But because of this arrangement, no one cleaned, dusted, organized, or imposed much in the way of discipline. “The dog’s been peeing on the carpet? Well, she (or he) can just deal with that when she’s (he’s) here.” “Not my turn to mow the lawn,” and so on.
And this is the house Kat and daughters inherit when we decide to get married. This is the place the seven of us will call home.
Friends, family, and therapists alike winced at the notion of Kat, Sarah, and Kellie moving into the house I’d occupied in a previous lifetime. Blending two families is hard enough without doing it in a house filled with apparitions from the past; so we did our best to make it ours. We remodeled the house with a vengeance. Out went the 20-foot vaulted ceiling over the living room and in went Kellie’s and Sarah’s bedrooms. We resurfaced everything we could: new carpet, new paint, new wallpaper, new sinks, new landscaping, new light fixtures, new contact paper. We scrubbed and purged.
At one point when tensions were high, we took the advice of a family counselor. “Native Americans would burn sage to purify old places,” she explained. On the way home from that session, we stopped at a food co-op and bought a bundle of sage the size of a whiskbroom. We purified the house, room by room. This was no wimpy incense stick; this was a mobile bonfire. The smoke detector went off. We ground ash into the new carpet. But there isn’t a bundle of sage large enough to make an old house 100 percent renewed. Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa will be 100 percent ours.
I’m a man with chronic bruises on his arms; the result of my pinching myself to make sure I’m awake. When I open my eyes in the morning and stretch south, I find this perfect thing in my arms. I hug a body that’s sparse yet powerful. I gaze at a face I never tire of. I brush back a leaf of hair and, knowing that after she opens her eyes for a wink, I’ll stare into brown eyes that radiate goodness. She’s a woman tender by nature but confident by will. She’s intelligent and street smart. She never flinched when checking her heart to see if there was room for three more kids — something I’ll always honor her for. No one can make me laugh harder. No one can make me feel calmer. There’s no one I trust more. She’s my best friend. I’ll die knowing I had at least one true thing in this world.
Kat and I transport nearly every stick of lumber down to the building site, and we transport our emotional baggage as well. But we don’t transport much liquor-store booty. If you were to look at the scorecard that tracks our genetic disposition toward alcoholism, you’d find us both batting a thousand. We both grew up in households where alcohol was an “issue.” Knowing this tweaked us, in different ways. Kat used this information to steer clear of trouble; I used it as an excuse to drive into it.
Kat opted for abstinence for twenty-five years. She drifted into moderate territory and eventually had her party days, but she kept hold of the reins.
I, on the other hand, began a twenty-year love affair with the Woodstock lifestyle from the moment I started college until I crashed and burned in my late thirties. I was the guy who ate the worm from the bottom of the mezcal bottle. I was the guy who wrote the term paper “The Therapeutic Uses of LSD” and used himself as the lab rat. So while the past is choppy, Kat and I have kept this part of our lives under control and aboveboard. She’ll have an occasional drink but never overdoes it. I simply stopped playing with fire. When people ask why I don’t drink, I tell them, “I got it all out of the way at an early age.”
It takes Kat a while to get the hang of the hammer. After installing one beam, she drives home a 16d nail, leaving forty half-moon pecker marks from missed swings. I write “Kat did this” next to all the marks, telling her I didn’t want my buddies coming up next weekend to think I’d missed that many swings. Kat thinks this is very un-funny. She tears up, feels hurt. I’m glad when the quip gets covered by drywall. And I’m glad to be married to a woman who’ll give me a running start at an apology.
Eventually Kat begins to take pride in her carpentry skills. Her lingo and hammer-swinging abilities improve to where she has a bit of jauntiness to her. On her way to the cabin one weekend, Kat stops at Menards home center and asks where the women’s work gloves are. The clerk directs her to the gardening gloves. That’s a mistake. Kat tells him she wants real work gloves. “I have a tool belt,” she informs the squirming kid.
And it is a momentous day when we drive the forty miles into Grand Marais to purchase Kat’s first power tool — a random orbital sander. She’s been sanding the exposed beams and the belt sander is damn near impossible to hold overhead. The hardware store has three models. She fondles each, test drives them one by one along the edge of the shelf as if it’s running. She examines the paper securing detail — Velcro or self-stick. I watch her evaluate the tools. If possible, I fall a little bit more in love. The yellow DeWalt is cheerier-looking and lighter, but the Makita is twenty dollars cheaper. The Skil is thirty dollars cheaper, but it also feels thirty dollars cheaper. And what a ho-hum color. Kat always goes for quality. We walk out of Buck’s Hardware with the DeWalt.
When it comes to hands-on work, we have similar habits. We both tear into a job, stay on task, and don’t clean up until it’s finished. I’d rather keep my momentum and trip over a logjam of 2×4 scraps all day long, than take 30 seconds to clean them up. When Kat insulates there are exploded bags of fiberglass everywhere. She cooks the same way; after a simple dinner of pasta, the kitchen looks like the cafeteria in Animal House. The difference is, when Kat’s done she cleans up — fast, of course. I can leave a mess for days, weeks, months.
There are some old habits that die hard when it comes to building. When I had my own construction company, I always had gophers (go fer this, go fer that). That’s what I was accustomed to — but not Kat. She didn’t get the gopher thing. She’d ask me to get her nails (did I hear that right?). And when I needed something I often got “just a minute” (uppity apprentice!). I had to recalibrate. I had to remember this wasn’t a construction company, it was a marriage.
We sometimes tackle jobs together, we sometimes work side by side on separate tasks. Either way we keep each other’s spirits up. We remind each other about Rule #1: “It’s gotta be fun.” When things get too un-fun we head for the deck overlooking the lake. We eat Doritos, smoke a cigarette, neck, take a catnap, take a hike — do something to break the un-fun cycle.
Yet we have our moments. Late in the project we decide to install cedar shingles in the triangular gable ends of the cabin. Kat spends the better part of a day priming and painting hundreds of cedar shingles. I tack up a few, and it just doesn’t look right. I think it would look much better if we installed natural cedar shingles, ones with round tips like fish scales that create a cool-looking pattern. Kat gets fuming. It’s times like this I wish God had given me the tongue physiology to link together the letters S, O, R, R, and Y, but it’s just not there. Hell knoweth no fury like that of a woman who hath painted little friggin’ shingles for three hours only to have their use rejected by a boneheaded husband.
There are other commandments I break during the building process, including:
We all have character flaws that follow us around like toilet paper stuck to the heel of our shoe. Everyone but us can see it. Everyone knows where we’ve been, and it’s tremendously funny, but it’s a little embarrassing to point it out and it’s not that big of a deal, so people just let it go. Everyone drags around a little Charmin. It’s your coworker eyeing the new VP position. Everyone knows there’s zero chance he will get the promotion, but he’s grinning. He knows he’s gonna get it. Toilet paper on the heel. It’s your friend cooking the perfect dinner, and you know somewhere along the line, she’ll misread the “three minutes” on the package as “thirty”; Charmin on the heel. One of the many trails of toilet paper stuck to the bottoms of Kat’s and my shoes has the words “Doesn’t know when to quit” written on it.
One day Kat is painting. She (1) lacks patience, (2) doesn’t like painting, (3) is working much on a day we vowed to not work much. I can see it coming. “Put the paintbrush down, step away from the window, and no one will get hurt.” But she’s hell-bent on finishing. Then there are tears and enamel paint dripping everywhere. It’s a bloody wreck. Later that night even Dick’s rum and Coke and Jean’s potatoes can’t save the patient. Ain’t that somethin’? On our wedding rings Kat and I inscribed, “Shared joy is double joy; shared sorrow is half sorrow.” But the equation doesn’t work all the time.
But we learn about paint and Charmin and each other and when to call it quits. And we learn one of the places we never call it quits is in taking the person for who they are. We learn that our role isn’t to turn each other into the person we think they should be, but to help them become the best version of who they want to be. If my wedding ring were wide enough, I’d inscribe that, too.
Second marriages are different; they better be, because if not, you’re looking at a third, fourth, and fifth. The grim fact is, two-thirds of all second marriages fail. By the time you say “I do” a second time, you better know that the person you’re marrying is the person you’re marrying — not someone you hope he or she will become. You better have learned to ride the compromise train.
Something got miswired in many marriages of my generation, the peace and love era. Simon and Garfunkel said I’m supposed to be kickin’ down the cobblestones, feeling groovy, but during my first marriage I’m trudging down some dark alley feeling plenty pissed off about something. Long hair couldn’t shroud the problems, love beads couldn’t make up for the lack of communication. No cobblestones, not groovy. And you know what, lamppost? I don’t give a rat’s ass about “what ya’ knowin’.” I had to grow up before marrying Kat.
One weekend we drive fifty miles to Duluth to watch Grandma’s Marathon — one of the ten races claiming the title “most scenic marathon in the country.” We find a spot at mile twelve and plunk down. It’s dumbfounding to watch the front-runners: a pack of twelve running a five-minute, five-second-per-mile pace. But it’s those that come behind that hold a place in Kat’s heart. The year we met, Kat was training for the Twin Cities Marathon. She’d joined the American Lung Association Running Club (ALARC) — a group that prides itself on a ninety percent–plus finish rate — and followed the training regimen. For Kat this was more than a long run; it was a year-long workout for strengthening lungs, legs, and pluck.
Three weeks before the marathon, her right leg begins plaguing her. Nothing torn or broken, just a slow, dull, rising pain. She has dozens of supporters and a few doubters. Her boss bets her twenty dollars she doesn’t finish — a guarantee she will finish. Neither of our mothers can grasp the concept of why anyone would run twenty-six miles when they could drive.
The day of the race we establish a game plan: The kids and I will meet her at the three-, ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-mile marks and at the finish. She has trained at a nine-minute-per-mile pace. But at mile marker three she doesn’t come by at twenty-seven minutes — or thirty minutes — or thirty-five. She comes by at thirty-seven, with a bandanna wrapped around her right leg, limping, frustration in her eyes. Something has torn. A smart husband would have wrapped his arms around her right there and — kicking and screaming or not — carried her to the car. But she insists on continuing. She finishes but with an injury so severe it prevents her from running distances for two years. Kat can sympathize with the ones running at the rear.
Kat has a rare yet very endearing disease: Robin Hood Syndrome (RHS). She robs from the rich and gives to the poor, with us being the rich, though we’re not, and the poor being just about anyone. Her philanthropy is spontaneous, carried out in guerrilla-like fashion, and based on “the look in her (or his or their) eyes.”
It’s like this. She’s shopping at a department store and notices a young woman of clearly modest means, repeatedly taking a dress off a rack, holding it up to herself in the mirror, caressing the hem, then putting it back. Kat sees Cinderella with nothing to wear to the ball. She sees the longing “look in her eyes.” Kat slides the sales clerk her credit card, buys the dress for Cinderella, then disappears incognito.
The kid in front of her at the gas station has a panicked “look in his eyes” as his credit card is rejected. A tankful of gas, an armload of food, and the kid’s nerves sit in limbo. Kat tells the clerk to put everything on her card, and the kid is flabbergasted.
“Gee, thanks, lady,” he says as he waits for the strings attached. Robin Hood attaches no strings.
She secretly pays the utility bill for the family of one of our kid’s friends that’s had their gas turned off. She buys coats, meals, groceries for the unexpecting, unassuming, and, probably at times, undeserving. She knows the “look in their eyes” well, because those eyes once stared back at her in the mirror. I hope they never develop an antidote for RHS.
Sometimes, when Kat and I see an older couple, we play the “I wonder if we’ll be like that when we’re old?” game. We see a couple in their eighties at the symphony. They shuffle with the same length of stride. They’re the same height, as if sixty years of seeing eye to eye has recalibrated their skeletons. They both wear a sophisticated gray. They look alike. Decades of sharing saliva, sperm, and tears has intermingled their DNA. They look at each other and kiss. That’s us, yes, surely that’s us. End of game.
And we see a middle-aged couple at a Denny’s. The few words exchanged are cold and edgy like cardinals flying hard into a picture window. There is no surprise in what’s ordered. The silence does not appear to discomfort them. Nope. That’s not us.
We meet Ken and Vi at the health club. “I’m Vi, and this is Ken. It’s easy to remember, just remember Vi-Ken,” the mnemonic based on Minnesota’s football team. They’re sixty-five-plus and at the club every afternoon. They always wear twin T-shirts emblazoned with a running or biking event they’ve completed together. Not wimpy ones either; Ironman 100 bike ride, Grandma’s Marathon, even MS 50 shirts. They lift weights and spot for each other. Some folks set their eyes on a condo in Arizona for their retirement prize. On the day Vi-Ken retired (both on the same day) they hopped on their tandem bike, pedaled 450 miles to Manitoba, then turned around and rode to the Gulf of Mexico. It took them two months. Uh-huh, that’s us.
And as we get to know Dick and Jean, who sold us the land, we think, “That’s us.” They didn’t bike 1,500 miles for retirement; Dick was too beaten up from years of working heavy construction. They bought a 28-foot motor home and drove south. Probably passed Vi-Ken on the way. We admire our neighbors-down-the-shore in every way. They clearly enjoy each other’s company. After decades of marriage they’ve learned each other’s rough spots and handle them like a good shock absorber. They’re always welcoming, always willing to lend a hand. Dick usually has an Ole and Lena joke and wisdom to dispense while looking over the top of his reading glasses. I’m going to stop a few words short of saying Dick was a father figure to me — but it was close. They are good people. Uh-huh, that’s us, too.
Ain’t that somethin’.
