The Bumpy Road of Life

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My husband is currently in the throes of a new project; he’s planning on writing a novel which will be set in some future apocalyptic time. At least that’s his current vision. So far, he has read two thick books for background—one about the details of the kind of damage a nuclear war would inflict on Earth, and one about survival tactics if society had to start over. He’s also made copious notes, and he’s got a stack literally an inch high of handwritten details (he is nothing if not thorough!) which he plans to add to the novel—as soon as he starts writing—whenever that may be.

When we went to lunch at Kneader’s last week with my sister and her husband, who were here visiting from Helena, Montana, he spent considerable time picking our brains about what kind of physical skills and mental toughness his lead female character would have to have if she were going to survive such a cataclysmic world disaster. (Never mind that it had been some time since I’d seen my sister, and we were hoping to catch up on what was happening with children and grandchildren!) You are probably impressed that he is insisting on such accurate detail. Don’t be. We’ve been through this before—not the world disaster part, the I-have-to-know-every-detail-of-my-current-obsession part.

Over the years, he’s been the happiest when he’s been hyper-focused on some project or other: quality sound systems for movie theater speakers (don’t ask how he got involved in that!), maximizing woodstove heat production for home use, esoteric auto repair, jewelry design and fabrication (he even taught classes at SLCC for this one), medieval cooking, medieval armor (an extension of the former category), grow-box gardening, and several years of gold prospecting,—including building his own complex system of sluices to extract the ore from ordinary dirt. At the moment, he’s also got a fancy structure on the table in his garage, which he claims is the perfect system to sharpen knives, including the swords he built years ago! Truth is, I’m relieved he’s currently so focused on nuclear war. He’s easier to live with if he has an engrossing obsession.

The other day, he was speculating on how humanity would react to an actual nuclear bomb detonating nearby. “Well,” I said, “ you might interview me?” But apparently, the fact that when I was a kid, I saw the mushroom clouds from not one, but TWO nuclear detonations float over my elementary school in the Nevada desert seemed to hold no interest for him–although now that I think about it, in later years my younger brother often expressed strong feelings about my ability to supervise when my parents were not home. I recall him spending a good deal of time complaining about his safety in the care of my radiation-damaged thinking.

To be fair, I guess we all have obsessions about something. Mine tend to involve chocolate. Daughter #1 loves Saturdays because she has designated it “FIZZ” day. For those of you not from Utah, FIZZ makes yummy soft drinks with additives like real cream and dozens of flavor options. Currently, Daughter #1 is enamored of something that has a Root Beer base and lots of cherry flavor. She’s right—it’s good. And she claims the $3 or $4 it costs is a good deal less expensive than some fancy anti-depression medication she might need should her workload reach the “overwhelming” tipping point. (She ought to know. She has a PhD in psychology.)

Well, you might ask, how have you and your husband managed to stay together so long when he spends so much time burrowed out in the garage on some esoteric project or other? An excellent question to which I answer—I have no idea? I used to think there was some magic formula that–when appropriately applied–made human relations just roll smoothly along the track of life. The trouble is, a few years into adulthood, we all discover there is no track, or even a road. There’s just constant  “undiscovered country” (thank you, Star Trek), and when we think we’ve finally got it figured out, we stumble across another sinkhole. (Oddly enough, as I was writing this, a literal three-foot deep sinkhole opened up in our backyard after the last heavy rain! Perhaps a message from Heaven?)

Years of marriage have taught me that I’m better off if I forgive the intensity of my husband’s obsessions when they obscure his attention to household problems—like fixing a dishwasher I went without for 18 months because he was unable to find time away from his current fascination (whatever that was at the moment) to take a look at the problem and discover that the dishwasher only needed a small part which turned out to cost less than $1.00!  Besides, in the back of my head, full disclosure whispers to me that I’m hardly blameless in the I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-that?-right-now category.

So we keep giving our shared road the best we can on most days, and the other days? We agree to keep our mouths shut, share a Coke, and start over again tomorrow.