Please understand.
I love my wife. And our marriage is an earthly manifestation of
God's love, especially after we had the counseling. But ever since
the day we met, 13 years ago, on a ski trip to Swiss Valley, our
relationship has been a competition -- even though, as we learned
in counseling, it is absolutely not a competition, because competitions
produce winners and losers, and what would you rather do, be a
winner or be married?
I was a freshman
at Notre Dame. She was a freshperson at Saint Mary's. A mutual
friend introduced Christine and me at the top of the mountain,
which wasn't really a mountain at all. Swiss Valley is a misnomer.
It's in Michigan, and the valley in question is actually a pit
dug at the base of a hill. Really more of a hillock than a certifiable
hill. The dirt from the pit was piled on top of the hillock to
create a total vertical drop of about 200 feet. So we said our
hellos and our nice-to-meet-yous at the top. I noticed that she
had long, pretty brown hair and stood nearly 6 feet tall. To this
day, she will periodically claim she is actually taller than I
am, but she's not. We'll be at a dinner party, and it'll come
up. Then I am forced to ask her to remove her shoes so that we
can stand back to back and have an impartial judge rule that I
am indeed taller, by a full inch.
Anyway, we started
our run together from the top of that snow-covered hillock. We
pointed the tips of our skis downhill. The race was on. And even
though we'd just met, she handled her poles like two sabers, slashing
and lunging at my legs, trying to make me fall, all the way to
the bottom. Lucky for me we met at Swiss Valley, because if it
had been Vail, a place with longer runs, the woman might have
killed me.
We've been married
now seven years. Like I said: total, nonstop manifestation of
God's love. And that manifestation reached fulfillment when, after
a late-night rollick in our backyard hammock, we delivered another
soul into the church's dominion. Burke is now 4 years old. At
press time, he was a super Komodo dragon with wings. By the time
you read this, that likely will have changed, since, prior to
becoming a super Komodo dragon with wings, he was a giant motorcycle
robot for all of a week. But the Komodo dragon has forever altered
the power struggle in our noncompetitive relationship.
First, he gives us
something else not to compete over. The Komodo dragon, for example,
hasn't yet mastered the process of wiping himself. This means
that when the three of us are eating at a restaurant, either Christine
or I must escort him to the bathroom. Invariably we'll be sitting
at the table, discussing the issues of the day, and the Komodo
dragon will interrupt, shouting, "I gotta go poo-poo!" Whereupon
his mother and I will fix each other with a steely glare, each
place a fist on an upturned palm, and hammer out a rock-paper-scissors
match. Two out of three. This method is the only one we've been
able to agree on for deciding who has to go and wipe. It's still
not a perfect system. I am clearly the superior rock-paper-scissors
player. My lifetime average against Christine stands near .800.
"Errgghupf," she
will say, in the restaurant, when she loses. "I hate you."
I will say, "Burke, tell Mom it's not nice to hate."
The Komodo dragon will say, "Mom, it's not nice to hate, you know."
It's the best.
The Komodo dragon also has altered our relationship by providing intelligence. Long-wed
couples who've seen a lot of action will sometimes refer to the
"fog of marriage." It's an apt metaphor for the bewilderment that
sometimes settles over the theater of operations -- like, say,
the time we got into a discussion about how Christine put off
filling out the health-insurance forms necessary to get partial
reimbursement for the cost of all those counseling sessions until
it was too late and about how blowing that money wasn't anything
like losing money playing poker because going all in on a fifth-street
flush draw might be risky, but not filling out health-insurance
reimbursement forms is just plain dumb. That never
pays off. In a discussion like that, it's tough to tell who's
winning. Especially because the counseling was her idea. And it
really did help.
I later joined the Komodo dragon on the living room floor to play Connect Four. We
were lying on our bellies, looking at each other through the tiny
portholes in the vertical game board. He said, "Dad, I love you
more than I love Mom. I love you 30 inches. I love her 10 inches."
See? That's solid intelligence. The Komodo dragon knew the score.
But he has most dramatically
transformed our connubial engagement by serving as a foot soldier
in it. Example: Christine does not like to be scared. I grew up
with a mother who could conceal herself in shadows like Gollum
-- crouching next to furniture, standing in closets -- where she
would sometimes wait for 10 minutes or more to leap out and startle
me. It was great fun. When I was in the first grade, Mom also
once put crumbled saltine crackers in my shoes while I was asleep,
thinking it would be hysterical when I put them on. Only her prank
didn't materialize until I'd gone to school and felt something
poking me in the toes. I took off a shoe and found a squished
cockroach in it. The crackers were all gone. That sort of high
jink you just can't plan. You've got to have the gift.
More stuff to talk
about next session. Anyway, the point is, I grew to appreciate
a good scare, the kind that makes people drop glassware and curse.
Even before we were married, I began jumping from behind things
and frightening Christine. Usually with a half-hearted "boo!"
because saying "boo!" is the most cliche scare tactic imaginable,
which is exactly what makes it so wildly effective. The scaree
gets all the angrier for being scared by a silly "boo!" Christine
let me know that she did not share my enthusiasm for this pastime.
After I got her really good one day, she said, "If you ever do
that again, I will punch you in the gut." And then, when I did
it again, she punched me, hard, in the gut.
You see where I'm headed with this. No way is a mom going to gut-punch her 4-year-old.
Even if he is a super Komodo dragon with wings. So I taught him
how to lie in wait, motionless, silent, slowing his respiration
to a barely perceptible rate. I told him, "This is how Komodo
dragons do it in the wild, by hiding quietly and then springing
from thickets or hedgerows or what have you and ravaging their
unsuspecting prey." Not only was I teaching him how to be patient,
a skill he'd need for the rest of his life, but I was teaching
him a little zoology along the way. And, of course, I was training
my own little special-ops commando.
The other weekend,
Christine dashed out of the house for a quick trip to Home Depot
down the street. I think she needed more line for the weed eater
or something so she could finish edging the yard. I was just rolling
out of bed. Being a thoughtful husband, I decided to shower while
she was out. That way, the water heater would be recharged by
the time she finished her yard work.
I also observed to the Komodo dragon that the minute Mom got back from the store,
she'd probably come straightaway to say good afternoon to Dad
in the shower and deliver unto him his well-deserved praise for
the shrewdness with which he'd played cards the night before.
Furthermore, I suggested, Mom would never expect that the Komodo
dragon might be hiding behind the bathroom door, which I'd left
ajar.
It. Was. Awesome.The Komodo dragon learned no fewer than five new words that day.
But the problem with some allies, as Donald Rumsfeld knows, is
that one minute you're shaking hands and the next minute you're
wishing you hadn't let cameramen take pictures of you shaking
that hand. So have I recently come to regard the Komodo dragon.
It seems he has taken all my aid, absorbed all my training and
developed his own domestic agenda. Not long ago, he approached
me in our kitchen, said, "Blue power -- wokachow -- you're
invisible!" and landed a haymaker square in my crotch. Completely
unprovoked, near as I can tell. Though the way Christine laughed,
I wonder.
* * *
Tim Rogers is the
executive editor of D Magazine, the city magazine of
Dallas.
(January 2004)
