18 Years of Books (now it's 25!!) (and now it's 30!!!)

I wrote this eleven years ago and it still holds true.

I met Erica in January of 1995 when she walked into Café Jones, the coffee shop where I was the late-shift barista. It was well below freezing that night in Billings, Montana and the shop had been empty for an hour or two. I was getting ready to close up early when I heard the door open and looked up to see two women come in, cacooned in layers of cotton and wool. My reaction was NOT love at first sight. In fact it was much more of a feeling of annoyance. Instead of getting to shut down early and go home, now I was going to have to stay for a while and dirty up the espresso machine I had just made sparkle.  Even worse was the possibility these two women might want food, which would cause even more mess in the now-spotless food prep area.

But then, as the two women removed hats and gloves and coats and claimed a table for themselves, something about one of them caught my eye.

Less than 4 months later, we were talking about getting married.

Today marks 18 years since we said our vows and drove away from the church in Grandma Nita’s mint green Ford. This post is a simple “Happy Anniversary” to the love of my life, Erica.

It is impossible to sum up 18 years of marriage, so I am not going to even try. Instead, I want to write about one thing that we have done since before we were even married. It is something we have done alone together in bed, in a car and on trains and planes and boats, on mountainsides in Montana and in quiet parks in Connecticut. We have even used a computer to do it a few times while one of us was traveling. It gives us both great pleasure.

Of course, I am talking about our tradition of reading out loud to each other. Ever since the spring of 1995, Erica and I have always had an out-loud book going. We generally alternate who chooses the book and we also switch off who reads and who listens. I have a very clear memory of Erica reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams in the back seat of her parents’ car as her father drove to Miles City, Montana—heading for my first exposure to the craziness that is Easter with Erica’s enormous extended family. As the main characters headed inevitably for a sex scene, Erica blushed a bit to be reading those words within earshot of her parents and we put the book aside.

In the years since, we have read some truly great books this way.  A few that stand out are Oscar and Lucinda, Possession, The Fool’s Progress, The Shipping News, The English Patient, Winter’s Tale, Lincoln in the Bardo, and the entire Harry Potter series. Occasionally, we will start a book that is unfinishable. A few in this category were Accordian Crimes and Freedom. To be a good out-loud book, a book must be good, (of course), but simply being good is no guarantee that a book will make for an enjoyable listening experience. Writers like Philip Roth have sentences that are too long and it is easy to lose the thread if his words are not on the page in front of you.

The best out-loud books have a strong story with characters who are easily differentiated. Extended meditations on anything, especially those with many parenthetical asides and tangents, make it hard to listen. A pet peeve of mine that has developed over the years is when an author will give a character a line of dialogue and then, AFTER the line is spoken, add a descriptor like “he said in a whisper.” When I am reading the book out loud it would be helpful to know the line is delivered in a whisper BEFORE I read it at full volume.

As it has become easier to watch excellent tv shows on demand on the Internet, our out-loud book tradition has taken a hit, but we are both committed to getting it back to its rightful place in our marriage. There is something intimate about reading a shared book to another person—most of us already know that from being kids and having a story read by a parent or older sibling. Anyone with kids knows how special it can be to curl up on the couch with a child and a book and create a world for a little while.

Our out-loud books helped Erica and me create a bubble around ourselves while we were on our honeymoon, camping all around Portugal and reading a non-fiction book about Christopher Columbus and the Age of Explorers. It has been true ever since. When she was pregnant with Isabel and we were preparing a bedroom for our new-baby-to-be, we were reading the first Harry Potter books out loud. Erica painted some Winnie-the-Pooh characters on the walls of Isabel’s room and as she did, I sat on the futon and read all about the Boy Who Survived and He Who Shall Not Be Named.

On long drives out West and in heavy traffic back East, the hours are so much more enjoyable with Erica reading a good book out loud. I remember hearing one of Carl Hiaasen’s very funny novels while driving from the Florida Keys up to the airport in Miami for an early morning flight. It is a way to share something at the end of a busy day, a way to have something to say to each other even if we are not feeling especially connected, and a way to be close. Sometimes it is a way for us both to turn our minds off and forget about something stressful so that we can fall asleep.

I can’t say exactly how many books we have made it through in this way, but it must be well over 100 by now—possibly more. I don’t normally give marriage advice. Every marriage is its own thing and to presume to know anything about what two other people should do in their marriage is crazy. (I have a hard enough time knowing what I should be doing in my own).  But I will give this one piece of advice and you are free to take it or leave it: pick a book and read it out loud with your partner before this summer is over.  Just give it a try and see if you like it. I think you might.

I joked with Erica last night that our 18 years of marriage have given me 15 or 16 of the best years of my life. Truly, each of the 18 has been a gift. Erica, you make my life interesting and challenging and exciting and I cannot wait to see where we go from here.  Our out-loud book is just one of the many things that makes life with you so good. Happy Anniversary, my love.

(2021 update) These are the most recent books---we finished the Louise Erdrich book pictured above a few weeks ago and liked it a lot. We are now halfway through Hamnet and LOVING it. It would not surprise me if it ends up being one of the best we have read.

(2025 update) And we are STILL reading books out loud together. Currently, we are working on Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. We are both enjoying the book a lot. Akbar is a poet and that sensibility makes itself known throughout the book. There are moments he manages to distill to a sharp essence that makes me stop for a beat to take it in.

 

Some others we have liked in the past four years are The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell and You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.

 

I had no idea back in 1995, riding out to that first Miles City Easter, that 30 years later we’d still be reading books with each other. Yet here we are. And it is still one of the best parts of my days, my weeks, my years, and my life. 

High Plains Running

I went for the craziest ten-mile run of my life this morning. Six inches of cold, powdery snow fell two days ago and then a steady 25 to 30 miles-per-hour wind started blowing from the West. Sometimes after a storm, the wind comes down the East slope of the Rockies and out into the Plains, sweeping everything not tied down out ahead of it. 

The snow streaks across the roads and freezes into a super-slick layer of black ice or gathers into drifts many-inches deep halfway across the lanes of traffic. On a short drive from Billings to Laurel yesterday we passed at least five cars that had spun off the highway and into the ditches on either side of the road. 

I am signed-up to run a half marathon in New Hampshire on February 15, so I am on a training schedule that had me doing a ten-mile run today. It seemed like a good idea for me to get out into the cold and the wind—(mid-February on the coast of New Hampshire might just be the same)—so I put on my new Secret Santa running shorts from my cousin Nicole and an undershirt beneath my running shirt and out the door I went. I got on First Avenue and headed uphill, slowly running my way out of the valley. 

It was very windy and as the road turned slightly east of north, it struck me that the wind that was whipping me along from behind would soon enough be pummeling me from the front when I turned back for the return five miles. The snow from two days ago was still very light and powdery and the wind was such that the blowing snow never got any higher than six inches off of the ground. It whipped across the fields and across the road in a serpentine motion—looking more like smoke or steam than snow. The look of the blowing snow combined with the way it stung my ankles and lower calves to make me think of malicious spirits. 

I was reminded of Tolkein’s description of Ring Wraiths or the movie depiction of Voldemort in the first Harry Potter film—before He Who Shall Not Be Named has found a body to inhabit. There was one advantage to the relentless wind that I could not have predicted in advance of my run. Wildlife on the sides of the road couldn’t hear me coming until I was right next to them. In this way I managed to get within 20 feet of a bald eagle as it stood in the snow and picked at the frozen carcass of a mule deer. When the bird finally saw me it didn’t lurch or panic at all. It fixed me in its sharp yellow eye, held steady for a long moment, and then simply opened its wings into the strong headwind and with a slight change in the angle of its feathers it rose up and drifted away in a graceful arc to the east, out over a stumpy cornfield.

I watched the bird for a long moment and then continued my run. By the time I had gone another quarter mile up the road the eagle had circled back around and was once again tearing chunks off of the roadkill deer. Once I had gone five miles up the road, out of the valley and into the high plains, I had gotten into a rhythm and felt the impulse to just keep running and running and running. 

The land is so big and the sky so open and the morning so extreme that part of me wanted to be extreme, too. What would happen if I just kept going? How far could I go? My body felt like a machine and the motion was hypnotizing. What I really wanted was to be that eagle and be carried on the wind for as long as it would blow. I felt myself disappearing into the landscape—a tiny dot in the vast sage and scrub landscape. 

I had no sense of struggle, no awareness of the cold. I was simply moving and wanted to keep moving. Eventually I turned around, into the wind, and the run became work again. A friendly woman driving by stopped and asked if I wanted a ride back to town. She was apparently moved to pity by the crust of ice coating my lower legs and my beard and mustache. I politely declined her offer and made it back to Grandpa Andy’s house, glad I had made myself go out and sure that my half marathon would be better because of it. I am also glad that I have my memory of that eagle and of the feeling of self-erasure that running can sometimes bring.

I Have Identified the Problem...

“I have identified the problem, I just haven’t made the time to fix it.”

My father-in-law said these words last night as we drove through the cold and dark of Montana on the evening before the Winter Solstice. We were headed east from Billings to Miles City for an early Christmas dinner with fifty of Erica’s closest relatives and the plastic panel next to me was rattling in a way that annoyed us all. I stuffed a pillow between my seat and the panel and the rattling stopped. I hadn’t fixed the problem, but I had stopped the noise.

A few hours later, after consuming about 4000 calories—mostly from butter and sugar—we got in the van and started back for Billings. As I rested my head against the inside of the window, looking for Northern Lights in the fifteen-below-zero degree darkness, Mike’s words came back to me: “I have identified the problem, I just haven’t made the time to fix it.” It struck me that in the larger context of my life, this sentence rings truer than I am strictly comfortable with. But before I could devote any of my overtired, overfull attention to this realization, I fell asleep—my exhalations freezing on the inside of the window into a thick layer of ice by the time I woke up in Billings.

The following morning I forced myself out the door for a four-mile run through air that was struggling (unsuccessfully) to reach zero degrees. As I ran the sweat made its way out through the three layers of clothes I had on and froze as hoarfrost on my legs, chest, back, and beard. To keep my mind off the frigid temperatures, I thought about what Mike had said the night before.

I have been reading some of Carl Jung’s writings about the challenges of mid-life, and this idea of identifying problems and working to make things different and better has been on my mind a lot lately.


Carl Jung identified 5 main phases of midlife:

* Accommodation (meeting others' expectations - actually, this takes place in the first part of life, but is the context in which midlife processes take place)
* Separation (rejecting the accommodated self)
* Liminality (a period of uncertainty, where life seems directionless and meanders)
* Reintegration (working out 'who I am' and becoming comfortable with that identity)
* Individuation (facing up to and accepting the undesirable aspects of our own character)


Along with these phases, (which are often non-linear and overlapping), Jung identifies the main choice adult humans have to make as they enter the second half of their lives. Jung says people can direct the bulk of their energies into conserving what they have created in their lives OR they can continue to be a creative force for change in their own lives.

I am at that exact point of having to make this choice. My mind and heart tell me to choose the second path, but I am finding a lifetime of habit to be a sometimes-powerful obstacle to overcome. I feel just like my father-in-law with his van door: I have identified the problems, I just have to decide whether, when, and how to fix them.