Holding on for Dear Life

44 years ago today, she and I exchanged I do's. To her everlasting credit she has. My story has a very different trajectory.

My first recollection of what has become the central theme of our marriage occurred on our honeymoon. I am certain there were earlier episodes, during our courtship, but these incidents were obscured in the fog of romance.

We sat on the freeway somewhere in California, our rental car disabled by a flat tire. As difficult as it may be for some of you to perceive, the concept of cell phones was not even incubating in 1977. Therefore, the wait for triple A was of uncertain breadth. Until then, one's own capacity had to suffice.

 "I have no idea how to change a tire", I announced to my already not so blushing bride. There was no shame in my comment, just a declaration of limitation. Trying to put this end of that foreign piece of equipment into the other, raise the car into the air, compel the nuts, or whatever they were called, off their perch, well I had a better chance of inventing the cell phone.

It should have been a warning, a shot across the bow. Retreat before it is too late.

Her curse is that she is as capable as I am not. She can perform any task put to her. Her mind works in logical sequence. Where I find gibberish in instructions, she can improve the manual, refine it so that even a simpleton could put A into B. Almost any simpleton.

When we first were wed, we resided in a small apartment. There, I could paper over some of my most glaring deficiencies. But not all of them.

I cannot cook. I cannot clean. I cannot change a lightbulb. These are not hyperboles. I mean I dare not turn on a stove without first alerting the fire department and confirming that no small children will be harmed in the making of this movie. Even in college, when my roommate and I were off the meal plan, he decided that, for his own welfare, he would do both the cooking and the cleaning of the dishes. And many a potato went to an early grave as my wife extracted the light bulb shards, lefty loosey, righty tidy proving too intricate a concept for my mind to grasp.

The sheer weight of my incompetence has proven very hard for some friends to bear. This, they have notified me, is an act borne not out of inability but inattention or worse, intent. But I am not that clever, not by half or even a quarter. What you see is, unfortunately, what you don't get. Or maybe what you do. That is not clear as to grammatical connotation.

Through it all, my beleaguered wife has persevered. Like Horton Hatches an Egg, she has been faithful 100 percent. Through the storm of my ineptitude, through the head shaking incapacity, through the seconds, the minutes, the endless monotony of being mother and father to virtually every issue that has erupted over 16,071 days and nights, through the bad, the worse and the ugly, she has been as solid as I have been full of holes.

This morning we were charged with the care of our not quite 3 year granddaughter, as she and we await the arrival of her 3 day old brother, as he escorts his mom and dad home from the hospital. Our granddaughter was working diligently on one of those square peg, round hole puzzles that looked to me as hard to decipher as a Rubik's cube. My wife gently walked our ward through the process until she had turned straw into gold. Meanwhile, I wondered how I had ever managed to graduate from pre-school.

My wife could have taken a different path all those years ago. Could have partnered with someone other than a person whose picture stands astride the word inept in Webster's. Could have not had her picture next to the tale of Sisyphus. Could have had two children instead of an unintended third.

To anyone who asks, I merely inform them that she gave up many years past. That she accepted her lot in life with a grace and dignity of which I am not deserving. That she has carried me around on her shoulders, up and down every mountain that we have climbed together. Correction, that she climbed, while I held on for dear life.

Dear life.