Jim
"It took us 27 years to agree on living together. Over the decades we’d been casual friends, good friends, friends with benefits, friends without benefits, hardly friends at all, happy lovers, bored lovers, vacationing lovers, cruel lovers--every kind of a lover that two people could be who were unable to completely commit or completely split up.
I was in my mid-twenties when Jim and I became friends, 40 when we got serious, and turned 54 the year we married. Our relationship never came close to matching the Hollywood version of romance of two people falling madly in love and merging into one inseparable being with hearts beating in unison.
In fact, we were the most unlikely of lovers. Jim was a reclusive inventor who, until his retirement this year, had hidden out in a factory job. I wore suits and schmoozed around in public relations and advertising. He had been a marine. I had been a war protester. He ate meat almost exclusively. I edged on being vegetarian. He drank beer from cans. I drank beer from bottles. We used to say that we had absolutely nothing in common.
Of course that was our lie. There was an unspoken, undefined, irresistible thing between us that we could not deny or escape--a mystical gold cord that linked us solar plexus to solar plexus. The truth we never faced was how we relied on each other, that I, with my hopeless optimism, was the perfect yin to his yang of cynical pessimism. He was the steady current in my changing life; I was the fresh air in his fixed routine."
Hover over pix for captions. Double click to see larger image.
I was in my mid-twenties when Jim and I became friends, 40 when we got serious, and turned 54 the year we married. Our relationship never came close to matching the Hollywood version of romance of two people falling madly in love and merging into one inseparable being with hearts beating in unison.
In fact, we were the most unlikely of lovers. Jim was a reclusive inventor who, until his retirement this year, had hidden out in a factory job. I wore suits and schmoozed around in public relations and advertising. He had been a marine. I had been a war protester. He ate meat almost exclusively. I edged on being vegetarian. He drank beer from cans. I drank beer from bottles. We used to say that we had absolutely nothing in common.
Of course that was our lie. There was an unspoken, undefined, irresistible thing between us that we could not deny or escape--a mystical gold cord that linked us solar plexus to solar plexus. The truth we never faced was how we relied on each other, that I, with my hopeless optimism, was the perfect yin to his yang of cynical pessimism. He was the steady current in my changing life; I was the fresh air in his fixed routine."
Hover over pix for captions. Double click to see larger image.
In Chicago after chemo 2005, when we thought he was saved.