The timing was fortuitous.
Frankly, I was not in the mood for reflecting on the Jolly-Sink scrum, the distorting ripples from Citizens United, the reality of who’s still standing their ground, the latest spin from the incipient Crist-Scott slog, the debate over red-light cameras and the scenarios surrounding mass transit.
That said, did this ever happen to you?
You’ve just exchanged sealed, special-occasion greeting cards with that certain someone. It’s a shareable, intimate moment. Cue some mood music. You open them together.
And they are the same, as in Hallmark identical. What are the odds? (As it turns out, not all that steep when you’re scouring the St. Patrick’s section of the card aisle at CVS Pharmacy at Swann and Howard.)
But still it was a jolt. It had never happened to us before. And there have been plenty of befores.
The details: Last week my wife Laraine and I exchanged wedding anniversary greetings via St. Patrick’s Day cards. We often do that because we were married on March 17, 1979. And, yes, we planned it that way. I’m relatively hard-core, shanty Irish, and Laraine is an unabashed, Gaelic enabler. So, for us, St. Patty’s day is an anniversary two-fer.
Some years the actual card is more skewed to anniversary with customized, personal Irish touches, such as an impish reference to Erin Go Braughless. Well, we think it’s funny.
In this case, the card was unpretentious, direct and only cost 99 cents. A shamrock and the words “Ireland Forever,” (Erin Go Braugh) adorned the front. Inside, of course is where it matters. I’ll spare the considerably-shy-of-love-sonnet language. But it might leave Elizabeth Barrett Frowning.
Heavy on a “forever” theme and adorned with sentimental doodles, it’s us. Hallmark happened to be the vehicle.
As you can imagine, by the time you get to 35 anniversaries, you’ve already prompted a familiar query: “What’s your secret?” Besides, that is, being terminally old-school or allowing for some sort of Faustian subplot. By now, we have well-honed, well-lived responses.
* Let’s starts with values. And it helps–increasingly–if couples are on the same side of the political spectrum. ( I don’t know how, for example, James Carville and Mary Matalin manage. Maybe it’s more of a sho-biz merger than a marriage.)
The point is, politics has rarely been this volatile and visceral. It’s virtually impossible to respect those that don’t share your core values. You can transition to March Madness, the pollen count, or who got robbed at the Oscars at a cocktail party. But there’s no rhetorical safe haven when you share a household. The unfriendly fire will follow you.
* Also included: a sense a humor. Some of it topical, some of it dark, and plenty of it virtually crying out for the admonition to “get thee to a punnery.” You gotta know your early George Carlin and your updated Jackie Mason. It’s the place for Bizarro, not Beetle Bailey. If you have to explain what’s funny, you have a serious partner problem.
It also helps if you like to add cartoonish touches and sardonic asides to the daily newspaper. You can imagine the opportunities presented by Rick Scott and Kim Jong-un.
* Then there are movies. No chick-flick/action-violence divides. In our case, it really helps that we both like foreign movies, period pieces and character studies. Movies made from plays–for example, David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross”–are especially appealing because they are so dialogue driven.
* Travel is a key variable. It means acting on your curiosities about what else is out there. How can a sense of your place–whether a neighborhood, city or country–be complete or valid unless it’s seen in context? Travel does that.
In our case, we’ve been to Cuba, for example, multiple times, but also love Olde Europe. We share the same short list of places we’d return to in a heartbeat: Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Prague.
We don’t travel in groups because we like exploring in each other’s company and seeing for ourselves. It’s also a great way to break in new puns and old Borscht Belt routines. We favor local mass transit over tours. Neither of us is drawn to cruising, no matter how alluring the buffets, slot machines and straw markets.
It also helps if at least one spouse knows a foreign language. In our case, it matters mightily that Laraine speaks Spanish and French, which also means Italian and Portuguese are hardly foreign. As for me, I’ve pretty much cleaned up my Philadelphia accent.
* Then there’s the thermostat setting. Incompatibility here will chill any relationship.
To review: values, sense of humor, movies, travel, thermostat. Not necessarily in that order.