My husband and I passed our 23rd anniversary this year. We've been married long enough that people coming to our home for the first time look at our wedding picture and ask, "Who is that?" We've been married long enough to have seven children, two high school graduates, one surgery, more than a dozen emergency room visits and several very memorable family vacations. Long enough to often read each others thoughts, though also long enough to know which thoughts are best left unspoken. Probably long enough to have a few secrets as well.
I wanted to write this post for our anniversary, June 30, but it was a day like many others we've shared - we were preparing for a houseful of company arriving the next day! The company stayed for a month, I left hurriedly for a family emergency and we all spent a month traveling, so I am just now writing 23 things I love about my husband, nearly 3 months later!
Here they are, in no particular order.
1. He drinks coffee in bed with me late at night, and sleeps soundly anyway.
2. He believes I could write a book.
3. He can fix anything from cars to washing machines to bikes to plumbing disasters.
4. He has the best moustache since Joshua Chamberlain in the movie Gettysburg.
5. He's not afraid of blood so he can handle all the stitches, loose teeth, bloody noses, injured pets and worse that occur in our family.
6. He encourages me to be much braver than I feel. If it were not for him I would never have parasailed, gone rock climbing, taken a three week bike trip, or had a baby!
7. He never complains about my family.
8. He loves my children as much as I do.
9. He doesn't let me get away with stuff. Sometimes I wish he would just stick up for me, but he loves me enough to call me on things if he thinks I am wrong. He wants me to be holy, not just happy.
10. He cares about my hair. He would be really disappointed if I cut it.
11. He likes my vegetarian cooking.
12. He makes flattering comparisons. Often he'll lean over and whisper, "Your bottom is much smaller than hers," or some such comforting comment. These days I especially like, "You were the youngest-looking woman in that room."
13. He buys and maintains our awesome fleet of bikes.
14. He still has all his thick, curly blond hair.
15. He likes it when I read books outloud.
16. He is a musical snob.
17. He is wise and fair and never jumps to conclusions.
18. He has the best work ethic of anyone I know. I don't always love this at the moment when it is interfering with my plans, but I really admire his integrity.
19. He does not begrudge me the Sunday New York Times.
20. He is completely trustworthy.
21. He lets me buy (almost) all the books I want, and provides me with (nearly) endless bookshelves to store them.
22. He is a really faithful friend to all his friends.
23. He knows me better than anyone and still loves me.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Monday, September 10, 2007
supersize
I am back in Asia, trying to compress my large American life into the confines of Malaysian society. The challenges are both physical and psychological.
On a purely physical level, we loom large in our surroundings. I am of average height for an American woman and seem to be about the same size as most of my middle-aged friends - not as thin as I used to be, but well within the healthy range. My husband is tall, though not inordinately so, my children are fairly normal sized American teenagers. But here in Asia we are massive. We do not easily fit into Malaysian clothes, cars or restaurant booths. We block the view when we sit in front of people at movies or in church. We spread widely on the seats of trains and buses, feeling as if we take up more than our fair share, unable to compact ourselves small enough to fit into Asian personal space.
It doesn't help matters any that we drive an enormous van in a country where most of the cars are subcompact or smaller. The minivan is relatively rare here, and even then it is an abridged version of the American one - narrow and tight. Parking spaces here are sized for Toyotas, Hondas and their miniature sized cousins - tiny little cars that look like they might have come out of Christmas stockings. People double and triple park along streets which already have parking spaces along both sides, leaving narrow passageways for drivers who are expected to be driving narrow cars. Turns are tight, hurricane gutters are wide and deep, upping the ante for the careless driver or the rare one with a wider wheel base.
We are large in other less tangible ways, too. We laugh a lot, we are familiar, we do not know when to show proper respect (though we try) and we are excessively casual. We sprawl too much, we lounge and slouch, we extend ourselves beyond our neat, electric gates too freely. We fool around at the swimming pool while most other families swim laps or take swimming lessons. We do cannonballs and have chicken fights, we lie down on the poolside benches and stare up at the sky while other people sit properly in the chairs.
I have long been familiar with the theories that suggest Americans are like they are because of their peculiar geography and history - that we spread ourselves wide because we live in a big land, that we are still looking for elbow room centuries after Daniel Boone moved West. I paid scant attention to such musings when I encountered them, mostly in academic journals or the occasional Atlantic Monthly type magazine. I figured they were primarily final projects for American Studies majors who later parlayed them into money making opportunities. But my year in Asia and brief visit back to the US has made me a true believer. We are a large people because we are from a large and spacious land. We have no idea how the rest of the world lives, and we can hardly imagine it.
While back in the US we took my daughter to college in the MidWest. We drove for 18 hours across the northeastern states, the width of New York, across northern Ohio, Indiana and into Illinois. The weather was perfect and the landscape was lovely beyond belief, even along the interstate. Most of the time the roads seemed nearly empty to me, used, as I had become, to driving in Kuala Lumpur. Even the 18 wheelers, unknown in Malaysia, did not seem too large for the road. the sky stretched out vast and blue; clouds floated high, even the airspace seemed huge and spacious.
If the St Lawrence Valley was grand, the MidWest was endless. Farms houses and silos looked miles away, with nothing but fields and empty space between them and the highway. Entrance and exit ramps were long and sweeping, profligate in their use of space since there was seemingly no end of land to be used up. Humble rest stops along the highway were vast, roomy caverns; the Ohio Welcome Center looked like a ballroom. Even the fullest parking lots had plenty of wide spaces to choose from. One could nearly always swing wide.
I have always nurtured what I believed was a healthy cynicism about the United States; I have never been a "my country right or wrong" kind of person; I have always tried to see things from a broader perspective than my own cultural lenses, and I welcomed the opportunity to live elsewhere for a year, to leave at least some of my cultural trappings behind and try in some small way to see my own world from the outside. I see that a year in Asia has changed my perspective the tiniest bit, but it has also made me realize that my culture is woven in and through every molecule of my being. I love being back here where everything seems larger than lifesize.
And yet, driving through the heartland my husband and I shook our heads over the amount of money, energy and resources required to sustain even the most frugal American lifestyle. Choosing to live where we used to, for example, requires us to spend more on gasoline in one month than many people live on for an entire year. And having seen another kind of life, we realize that is, indeed, a choice, not a fact of life. But at the same time I found myself longing to be home to stay, vowing I would never take anything for granted again, almost in the spirit of a foxhole conversion. "God, just let me move back to the US and I will send all the money I can spare to the Third World and never forget how blessed I am."
For now I am back in Asia - a expat version of Asia to be sure, with a big house, big car, plenty of money to dine out and travel - but close enough to rub shoulders daily with real people who know a very different life, and I find myself wondering if it is possible to have too much freedom, too many choices, too much space, too much money, too many rights, too much land. I don't really know, though I am certain it is possible to be much too attached to that kind of life.
I have before me a year to think about it, a tidy, compact, polite, manageable Asian year. I hope to think some big thoughts.
On a purely physical level, we loom large in our surroundings. I am of average height for an American woman and seem to be about the same size as most of my middle-aged friends - not as thin as I used to be, but well within the healthy range. My husband is tall, though not inordinately so, my children are fairly normal sized American teenagers. But here in Asia we are massive. We do not easily fit into Malaysian clothes, cars or restaurant booths. We block the view when we sit in front of people at movies or in church. We spread widely on the seats of trains and buses, feeling as if we take up more than our fair share, unable to compact ourselves small enough to fit into Asian personal space.
It doesn't help matters any that we drive an enormous van in a country where most of the cars are subcompact or smaller. The minivan is relatively rare here, and even then it is an abridged version of the American one - narrow and tight. Parking spaces here are sized for Toyotas, Hondas and their miniature sized cousins - tiny little cars that look like they might have come out of Christmas stockings. People double and triple park along streets which already have parking spaces along both sides, leaving narrow passageways for drivers who are expected to be driving narrow cars. Turns are tight, hurricane gutters are wide and deep, upping the ante for the careless driver or the rare one with a wider wheel base.
We are large in other less tangible ways, too. We laugh a lot, we are familiar, we do not know when to show proper respect (though we try) and we are excessively casual. We sprawl too much, we lounge and slouch, we extend ourselves beyond our neat, electric gates too freely. We fool around at the swimming pool while most other families swim laps or take swimming lessons. We do cannonballs and have chicken fights, we lie down on the poolside benches and stare up at the sky while other people sit properly in the chairs.
I have long been familiar with the theories that suggest Americans are like they are because of their peculiar geography and history - that we spread ourselves wide because we live in a big land, that we are still looking for elbow room centuries after Daniel Boone moved West. I paid scant attention to such musings when I encountered them, mostly in academic journals or the occasional Atlantic Monthly type magazine. I figured they were primarily final projects for American Studies majors who later parlayed them into money making opportunities. But my year in Asia and brief visit back to the US has made me a true believer. We are a large people because we are from a large and spacious land. We have no idea how the rest of the world lives, and we can hardly imagine it.
While back in the US we took my daughter to college in the MidWest. We drove for 18 hours across the northeastern states, the width of New York, across northern Ohio, Indiana and into Illinois. The weather was perfect and the landscape was lovely beyond belief, even along the interstate. Most of the time the roads seemed nearly empty to me, used, as I had become, to driving in Kuala Lumpur. Even the 18 wheelers, unknown in Malaysia, did not seem too large for the road. the sky stretched out vast and blue; clouds floated high, even the airspace seemed huge and spacious.
If the St Lawrence Valley was grand, the MidWest was endless. Farms houses and silos looked miles away, with nothing but fields and empty space between them and the highway. Entrance and exit ramps were long and sweeping, profligate in their use of space since there was seemingly no end of land to be used up. Humble rest stops along the highway were vast, roomy caverns; the Ohio Welcome Center looked like a ballroom. Even the fullest parking lots had plenty of wide spaces to choose from. One could nearly always swing wide.
I have always nurtured what I believed was a healthy cynicism about the United States; I have never been a "my country right or wrong" kind of person; I have always tried to see things from a broader perspective than my own cultural lenses, and I welcomed the opportunity to live elsewhere for a year, to leave at least some of my cultural trappings behind and try in some small way to see my own world from the outside. I see that a year in Asia has changed my perspective the tiniest bit, but it has also made me realize that my culture is woven in and through every molecule of my being. I love being back here where everything seems larger than lifesize.
And yet, driving through the heartland my husband and I shook our heads over the amount of money, energy and resources required to sustain even the most frugal American lifestyle. Choosing to live where we used to, for example, requires us to spend more on gasoline in one month than many people live on for an entire year. And having seen another kind of life, we realize that is, indeed, a choice, not a fact of life. But at the same time I found myself longing to be home to stay, vowing I would never take anything for granted again, almost in the spirit of a foxhole conversion. "God, just let me move back to the US and I will send all the money I can spare to the Third World and never forget how blessed I am."
For now I am back in Asia - a expat version of Asia to be sure, with a big house, big car, plenty of money to dine out and travel - but close enough to rub shoulders daily with real people who know a very different life, and I find myself wondering if it is possible to have too much freedom, too many choices, too much space, too much money, too many rights, too much land. I don't really know, though I am certain it is possible to be much too attached to that kind of life.
I have before me a year to think about it, a tidy, compact, polite, manageable Asian year. I hope to think some big thoughts.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Jet lag
Madam is back and jet-lagged with a vengeance. She has decided that jet-lag is a lot like PMS: it doesn't actually make anything bad happen, it just makes it seem like everything that happens is bad. And that is not good.
She was only in the Western hemisphere for five weeks, but that was apparently long enough to throw off her groove - her recently acquired, rather shaky Asian groove, that is. So when she stepped off the plane in Singapore after a 36 hour trip she was not really prepared for the incident in the cafe. She ordered drinks and Chelsea buns for her family - a latte for herself, which she left at the table her older children occupied while she quickly checked to make sure she had received plenty of junk in her email box while she was cruising at 900 mph. She was not disappointed.
When she returned to the table her children had just left (presumably to check their own email), a zealous cafe worker was already clearing off the table - coffee and all. Fortunately her husband at the next table was perceptive and realized her coffee was in danger. Knowing what would happen to madam if she were denied her coffee, he snagged the cup before the busboy- girl did.
So, Madam gratefully took the now lukewarm latte, along with her two small daughters, and sat back down at the shiny, clean table. Several Chinese businessmen were getting settled at the next table. Just as Madam sat down with her back to them, a hand reached over her shoulder and grabbed her latte, still with the lid on. Striving for the "I'm-sorry-there-must-be-some-mistake-here" tone of voice, Madam smiled thinly through her headache and said, "But that's my coffee" and took it back, expecting perhaps a mumbled, emabarrassed apology for the rudely executed mistake. She forgot, of course, where she was. The man, who evidently did not speak English, made some comment to his fellows, and reached again for her coffee, putting it back on his table with not so much as a glance at Madam, who was, after all, only a female.
As luck or Providence would have it - or perhaps owing purely to genetics - her husband, who happened to be at least a foot taller than the coffee-snatcher, intervened and retrieved the coffee in dispute a second time. Madam foolishly thought that at this point everyone would have begun apologizing in their native tongues, claiming to be at fault, offering to buy fresh coffee for all concerned, but in this case only muttering and grumbling ensued next door. Her husband's efforts to be magnanimous were not appreciated. Madam did get to keep her latte, but she found she could not enjoy it. Welcome to Singapore.
The rest of the trip was mercifully uneventful, though the airport van driver was unhappy that he could not see out the rearview mirror since Madam's large family had so much luggage. After her month's absence Madam discovered her house had been reclaimed by giant cockroaches, that her cat had somehow acquired a blood parasite while boarding at the vet's and cost 50% more to retrieve than the price she had expected, that her mail was wet and soggy and mildewed after four weeks in a leaky box. Madam forgot about the remote parking meters when she ran into the vet's office to pick up the expensive cat, and came out to find a parking ticket flapping on her windshield while the cat tore at her linen shirt. Welcome to Malaysia.
Madam still had grocery shopping to do since the cupboard was bare except for cockroaches. She wandered through the grocery store in a haze, pushing the cart with a sticky wheel. She wondered, as she always does, what is being said on the loud, monotone recording that always plays in the meat department, chanting the same phrase over and over again. She avoided the aisle with the Durian fruit which smelt like old garbage. She looked in vain for several products which the market often carried, and learned they were out-of-stock, or "finished" as they say here. She was grateful to find a checkout queue with only three people in it and paid for her groceries with pink and blue and peach colored notes.
Madam drove cautiously home, being careful to stay on the left side of the road. She felt unready to resume her parallel life here on the other side of the globe, but she knew that things would look much better in a few days time. All she needed was time, and sleep -lots of sleep.
She was only in the Western hemisphere for five weeks, but that was apparently long enough to throw off her groove - her recently acquired, rather shaky Asian groove, that is. So when she stepped off the plane in Singapore after a 36 hour trip she was not really prepared for the incident in the cafe. She ordered drinks and Chelsea buns for her family - a latte for herself, which she left at the table her older children occupied while she quickly checked to make sure she had received plenty of junk in her email box while she was cruising at 900 mph. She was not disappointed.
When she returned to the table her children had just left (presumably to check their own email), a zealous cafe worker was already clearing off the table - coffee and all. Fortunately her husband at the next table was perceptive and realized her coffee was in danger. Knowing what would happen to madam if she were denied her coffee, he snagged the cup before the busboy- girl did.
So, Madam gratefully took the now lukewarm latte, along with her two small daughters, and sat back down at the shiny, clean table. Several Chinese businessmen were getting settled at the next table. Just as Madam sat down with her back to them, a hand reached over her shoulder and grabbed her latte, still with the lid on. Striving for the "I'm-sorry-there-must-be-some-mistake-here" tone of voice, Madam smiled thinly through her headache and said, "But that's my coffee" and took it back, expecting perhaps a mumbled, emabarrassed apology for the rudely executed mistake. She forgot, of course, where she was. The man, who evidently did not speak English, made some comment to his fellows, and reached again for her coffee, putting it back on his table with not so much as a glance at Madam, who was, after all, only a female.
As luck or Providence would have it - or perhaps owing purely to genetics - her husband, who happened to be at least a foot taller than the coffee-snatcher, intervened and retrieved the coffee in dispute a second time. Madam foolishly thought that at this point everyone would have begun apologizing in their native tongues, claiming to be at fault, offering to buy fresh coffee for all concerned, but in this case only muttering and grumbling ensued next door. Her husband's efforts to be magnanimous were not appreciated. Madam did get to keep her latte, but she found she could not enjoy it. Welcome to Singapore.
The rest of the trip was mercifully uneventful, though the airport van driver was unhappy that he could not see out the rearview mirror since Madam's large family had so much luggage. After her month's absence Madam discovered her house had been reclaimed by giant cockroaches, that her cat had somehow acquired a blood parasite while boarding at the vet's and cost 50% more to retrieve than the price she had expected, that her mail was wet and soggy and mildewed after four weeks in a leaky box. Madam forgot about the remote parking meters when she ran into the vet's office to pick up the expensive cat, and came out to find a parking ticket flapping on her windshield while the cat tore at her linen shirt. Welcome to Malaysia.
Madam still had grocery shopping to do since the cupboard was bare except for cockroaches. She wandered through the grocery store in a haze, pushing the cart with a sticky wheel. She wondered, as she always does, what is being said on the loud, monotone recording that always plays in the meat department, chanting the same phrase over and over again. She avoided the aisle with the Durian fruit which smelt like old garbage. She looked in vain for several products which the market often carried, and learned they were out-of-stock, or "finished" as they say here. She was grateful to find a checkout queue with only three people in it and paid for her groceries with pink and blue and peach colored notes.
Madam drove cautiously home, being careful to stay on the left side of the road. She felt unready to resume her parallel life here on the other side of the globe, but she knew that things would look much better in a few days time. All she needed was time, and sleep -lots of sleep.
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