The Marriage Glue

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

Robert Frost

I’ve always been a storyteller. When I was in the eighth grade, I recall my teacher explaining the definition of “loquacious” to the class. “Janice is loquacious,” he said. Everyone nodded in complete understanding. At the time I thought it was a compliment. My dad once described me as a “jukebox”–which had no off switch. (Fortunately, I just talk; I don’t sing!) Even when I’m alone, I tend to mutter to myself under my breath. I discovered long ago I problem solve best by vocalizing (or writing) my thinking. Useful knowledge for me; pretty annoying for everybody else.

My husband, on the other hand, learns best by working with his hands. He’s currently into the fourth or fifth day of replacing the brakes on an old car we’ve giving to an extended family member. Per usual, he had to build a special tool to complete the job. Over the years he’s spent a lot of time complaining about engineers who design machines inefficiently because it’s cheaper. If my husband had built the world, it would be a model of perfection. On the other hand, it would still be unfinished . . .

So the question becomes, how have we stayed married for more than 50 years? Wish I had some profound earth-shaking pronouncement, but I don’t. My husband once decreed that whoever filed for divorce first had to take the kids. When you have eight of them, that threat put a serious damper on some thoughtless reprisal for a short-term irritation.

The two of us almost always view the world from totally opposite lenses. I love babies; he’d never held one until our first child was born. I like tacos; he thinks rattle snake makes an interesting meal. I like t-shirts and jeans. He is happiest when he’s wearing 50 lbs. of armor and swash-buckling around with the broadsword he built in the garage. I grew up discarding everything that wasn’t critical to family maintenance so the Air Force didn’t have to move it. He is constitutionally unable to let anything go–which explains the treasures of trash piled high wherever he happens to drop them. ETC.

I read once that marriage is when two actors memorize dialogues for separate plays, then try to meld their third act lines into a brand-new performance. That sounds about right. But it seems like a pretty poor basis for putting up with slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Once the two AM feedings and the washing machine meltdown set in, there’d better be something else holding a couple together

On days when our differences seem insurmountable, I pull out the list of memories which I keep in a file titled “thank goodness he’s here” hidden somewhere in the back of my head. Like the time we drove to San Francisco for Son #3’s best friend’s wedding, and my husband didn’t notice the small concrete barrier which marked the edge of the off-ramp into the city. We hit it head on. There was a crack of metal tearing but no obvious damage. Besides stopping in the middle of a San Francisco freeway wasn’t really an option, so we drove into the parking lot of the Oakland Temple where the wedding was taking place.  When we stopped, my husband double-checked the undercarriage again. There was oil dripping onto the asphalt. Not much oil though. Most of it had obviously already drained away.

My daughter, son, and I headed into the temple for the wedding. Convincing the temple matron to let him use her office phone (no cell phones in those days), my husband called one auto repair place after another until he found one which had a new oil pan which fit out car and was willing to deliver it to the beautiful building on the hill overlooking the city—a long way from their shop. The bad news—he missed the wedding. The good news is that  as we were coming out, he was putting several quarts of oil under the hood. The engine purred, and we drove ourselves to our hotel. Not surprisingly, he got a bit of a standing ovation when we showed up at the reception.

Or the summer I was the Stake Girl’s Camp Leader. We met way too early in the morning at the church (why are kids willing to get up at the crack of dawn to get to camp and then can’t be dragged out of their sleeping bags for breakfast the next morning?). I loaded up five or six girls into my van and pulled a trailer with all the camping equipment, plus a week’s worth of food for a dozen stake leaders. About a mile from camp on a nasty dirt road somewhere the other side of Kamas, the van stopped dead and refused to move. A very patient bishopric-guy in a truck behind me helped the girls and me hook the trailer to his vehicle. We pushed my car out of the way of the 10 or 15 other cars behind us and locked it up. Once we got everybody to the campground, I hiked up the side of a mountain to get cell phone coverage and called my husband.  

He didn’t even sound upset. “Mmmm.” He said. “Sounds like the timing belt.”

Crap, I thought. We’re going to have to pay to have that car towed to the nearest town. I started a mental tally about what that might do to my check book. It wasn’t pretty.

Three or four hours later, my husband showed up in his old truck; there was a stack of old moving blankets in the back. He jacked up the car, made himself a little soft bed to lie under it and spent about six hours replacing the timing belt. When he was done, he drove the car into camp, had dinner with us, and walked the mile back to his truck so he could go home and sleep in his own bed. Even the two or three men in the camp were dumbstruck. The engine, the van, the girls, the trailer, and I made it home without a ripple of trouble.

I heard a prophet once say that “loyalty and trust” are the glue that holds marriages together. He’s absolutely right–that and a little axle grease judiciously applied as needed.