Brushing aside differences to celebrate shared vision
There’s a cabinet behind the mirror in our bathroom. You may remember that I have CDO. (That’s OCD in alphabetical order.) On the cabinet’s bottom shelf, I’ve arranged the toothpastes and sunblock we use on a daily basis, in order of height. On the second from the bottom, there are all the medications I take in my early senior years, arranged in alphabetical order, starting with amlodipine.
When Brian was hospitalized for his big toe amputation in July, I organized his shelf, too, so the Nexium is always to the right of the atorvastatin.
The issue is the two upper shelves. I get up at 4:30 in the morning, leaving the bathroom dark so as not to wake Brian up, and I shave, shower and reach for the hairbrush. I have to grope to find it on the second shelf from the top, which, me being 5-foot-6, I can just barely reach. I brush what’s left of my hair and put the brush on the shelf where it belongs: the third shelf, perfect reaching distance for my shrinking frame.
Sometime after that, Brian gets up, showers and reaches for the brush. Being 5-foot-7, he places it back on the second shelf.
This hairbrush is a metaphor for our marriage.
On Sept. 19, 1987, in a candlelit Chelsea bar on a very rainy day, Brian and I were illegally married by a priest (who got defrocked for doing it). On Sept. 19, 2008, at the top of the marble staircase in San Francisco City Hall, Brian and I were legally married, thanks to the wisdom of then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. So according to Hallmark, this month marks either our Lace or our Food anniversary.
But me, I’m thinking it’s the Hairbrush anniversary.
Brian and I are the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of gay marriage, not alike in any way. He can eat no fat, and I can eat no lean, which explains why I’ve outweighed him by a good 30 pounds for the 36 years we’ve been together (our Antiques anniversary, according to Hallmark). He’s descended from the Mayflower, whereas no one in my family has ever claimed to be so much as Lace Curtain Irish, which Nurse Vivian described as those “who could afford fruit on the table even when no one in the house was sick.”
But somehow our union works. We’ve gazed into each other’s eyes a fair amount of time, but more often than not, we have gazed out at the world before, together but each with a different perspective.
Marriage is not about seeing different worlds with the same eye; it’s about seeing the same world with different eyes.
What we see we pour into two forms of art. For him, it’s the ephemera of dance — whirling, jumping bodies, here for a moment, then gone. For me, it’s the column I write each week on the back page of The Chronicle — forever on the printed page, if only ever used to wrap fish. But we tell the same story: the Deputy and Dance Hall Girl, who moved out West to find our fortune and found along the way that our fortune consists of two adopted sons and a pack of rescue dogs. Our El Dorado turned out to be the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior.
Two different pairs of eyes see the same world, and we smile, because I know that his will tear up when he listens to the Moonlight Sonata. He knows mine will tear up when Captain America lifts the hammer of Thor.
Two different pairs of eyes have gotten older, so we won’t see her, but as the family sits down to evening supper, Queenie will grab the reading glasses Brian has left on the arm of the chair and bury them in the backyard. She’s planting an eyeglass garden. It’s quite a spectacle.
Two different pairs of eyes have watched two infants turn into young men, his from the vantage of the man who rocked them to sleep while crooning Anne Murray songs, mine from the perspective of the guy who coached them in soccer and basketball.
This chosen family has been our vision quest.
It’s unlikely I’ll show up with either lace or food this Sunday. More likely some new reading glasses. So we can continue to see the world together.
We’ve gazed into each other’s eyes a fair amount of time, but more often than not, we have gazed out at the world before, together but each with a different perspective.