The Best Guess (or, “Mustaches Woven from Heavenly Manna”)
It’s our anniversary month. Shannon and I have been married for 20 years. Where did they go? I keep asking that question and I keep not knowing the answer. But I feel like days and years go somewhere, like all of this is a circle and not a line. I don’t know that, I just feel it, without evidence. Neither life nor love is science, after all. They’re a series of guesses. And you never really know if you guessed right. But you hope you did, and you act like you did, which is usually good enough, with a little luck, to mean that you did.
Back when I went by the intimidating monicker “Ron” (Mar 2002)
I met Shannon on the Saturday before 9/11. We were opposites. Shannon liked Yanni, for example. This was and remains indefensible. Yanni is simply Frank Zappa for your grandma, albeit with a mustache woven from heavenly manna.
Another way we were opposites was that Shannon had money to her name and I did not. This was not my fault. Snowboarding and CDs were expensive and jobs were very hard to come by in those days, unless you wanted to show up for work on time and not leave until you were supposed to, and perform actual labor in the intervening timeframe.
For some reason, none of this mattered to us. Probably this is because when somebody is smokin’ hot and you think they’re interested, you ignore all data that might undermine your desired conclusion. Humans do that a lot, actually, in politics, academics, sports betting, love. It’s an attempt to maintain the illusion of control, to pretend we’re not just throwing gorgeous Hail Marys all the time. You can pretend if it makes you feel better. But they’re all more or less guesses in the end.
We had nothing to do with this car’s issues (our — quite intact — car is in the background) apart from helping out the driver. I assure you this is true. (May 2002)
For our honeymoon, Shannon and I drove her Dodge Neon from southeast Idaho to the Northern California coast. I looked at a map and guessed the trip would take twelve hours on the backroads. I guessed wrong. We left Shannon’s parents’ house at 6 am. We rolled into the isolated bed and breakfast at 5:30 the next morning, just as the eastern sky was igniting, just as the sea was taking shape in the milky daylight. The car bumped to a stop. The radio was playing Cyndi Lauper.
We got out, we stood for a second on the edge of the continent in half-light. It was Sunday morning. We were barely awake. We married four days earlier, where we took a guess, we locked hands, we jumped. And now we were going in circles together around this planet’s axis. The sun was rising. We were spinning, we didn’t know where to. Caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new. Was it a good guess? You never really know.
You just hope it is, and act like it is, and, with a little bit of luck, it is.
