you are viewing archives from 2004

the incredible, edible a.

A. and I woke up at 8:30 this morning. Yes, a Sunday. We threw on some clothes, stashed Daisy in her crate with a peanut-butter filled Kong and headed out to a local sports bar disguised as a western-themed restaurant to catch the Bears game at 10.

If you haven't guessed, my parents are in town.

I told him that he didn’t have to come. A. has less interest in football than, well, me. I know the names of the teams, can pick out a player or two, and know what a hold looks like. But that’s about it. In the past year that A. and I have lived together, we’ve caught maybe three football games and a baseball game, and they’ve all been over at Older SlackBrother J.’s house. The most sports-oriented thing we watch over here is the World Series of Poker.

But here we were on a Sunday morning, out with my family, yelling at the television screen and putting away platters of biscuits and sausage gravy.

I told A. he didn’t have to come. That no one would think less of him. But he came, he saw, he watched. He was concerned that he didn’t say much, but every time he opened his mouth, everyone stopped and listened. In a family where the loudest person is the person who gets to talk, that’s quite a feat.

SlackDad said to me two Christmases ago, A. seems like a guy you can really talk to.

And he really is.

It’s not like we sit around discussing philosophy whilst drinking brandy and smoking skinny brown cigarettes. A typical day at Casa Mysterioso might end with sitting around playing Fable or Star Wars Battlefront, drinking White Russians and smoking skinny brown cigarettes. Totally different.

Some days I can’t believe my luck. I once told A. I feel like you’re something I picked up at a garage sale for a dime, took it to Antiques Roadshow and discovered that it was worth millions.

Except that I don’t need a stuffy Englishman to tell me that my boyfriend is indeed, priceless.

I haven’t been fun and games to live with the past few months; no one is more aware of this than me. I’m frustrated by the path my career has taken. I’m moody. I’m constantly exhausted and tired and achy. I fret over finances, the dog, my weight fluctuations. I let myself get bogged down in the mire of everyday life. And instead of things calming down, they get progressively more insane: the past month we’ve had two parties, my birthday, my Slack-Sister-in-Law nearing her due date (she’s two weeks overdue and SlackNiece is destined to arrive on Tuesday!), my parents, my Aunt, and my cousin all visiting. In the middle of this, he’s running two shows, putting together a new show, writing scripts, and keeping it all together. Through it all he’s been charming and polite and complains not a whit. And after waking up at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, a day where he normally gets to sleep in, to go watch a football game of all things, the only thing he can say is I didn’t talk enough.

I was poking around the Grove, an upscale mall in Los Angeles, with my mother last Wednesday. We wandered into the Turner Classic Movies Store, which has an entertainment museum in the back. One of the docents, a stooped, greying man with a hearing aid came up to me and struck up a conversation. He pointed out his wife, a charming looking older woman, who was also a docent. We’ve been married 59 years next week he told me. And you know what the secret is?

What? I asked.

The secret is that you have to work to make them happy every day. It’s not enough juts to tell them that you love them. You have to show them. That’s your mission in life.

I agreed.

I think that if I live to a hundred and forty-three, I still won’t have enough time to show A. how much he means to me, I won’t be able to give him the amount of happiness that he deserves.

But I’m certainly going to try.