In my final semester of undergrad, I found myself staring down the barrel of an impending marriage proposal. I was waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, nightly, after a recurring dream that always ended with my lungs collapsing as I walked down the aisle. Each time, I awoke to find my hands clasped to my sternum, in an attempt to resuscitate myself. Then I’d check my left hand to confirm that, in fact, it was still sans ring-with-a-rock.
Like all females do when faced with dilemmas of the romantic persuasion, I sought advice. I seriously didn’t know whether it was the guy or the institution that terrified me. If it was the former, the answer was obvious, not easy, but obvious. If it was the latter, which I believed it might be, I wasn’t sure which advice, of all the sage wisdom one gets regarding fear in a lifetime, to take. Don’t think—just jump; don’t walk away—run like hell; Just plug your nose—and swallow. Everyone close enough to me in whom I could confide had a different opinion. The more I sought advice, the more I faltered.
One day I was having tea with my grandmother and her friend, Corrine. (We’ll call it tea, as that’s what my grandmother would want everyone to remember her as having drank by the cupful). Corrine was 92 at the time. She had immigrated from Ireland in her teens and certainly looked the part—little, scrappy, red hair. I laid my dilemma out for them and asked that they give it to me straight. Corrine pulled me, by the hand, off the balcony and into her living room. She pointed to the west wall, which was entirely covered with black and white photographs of what could feasibly have been, from the looks of her waste-low bosom, her immediate descendants. She waved her hand over the collage and said. . .
Well, actually, she began pointing to each one and telling me all about them and what sorts of bones they had broken, and how much that had cost her to fix, and what they had done for a living before they'd been fired and had started hitting her up for cash, and. . .you get the picture (see my pun?). And then she asked me to bring the bottle of ‘tea’ out to the porch when I was finished looking.
I have a point here, I think. Oh, yes, here it is. DON’T ever ask for advice on matters of the heart. EVER. You ALWAYS know all by yourself if you sit quietly in the midst of the sum of its parts. If you’re waking up in cold sweats, you already know the answer. In the end, it wasn’t anybody’s advice that helped. What did help were the pictures, the boobs and the booze. By this point, sorry Grandma, we all know it wasn't tea. Corrine had admittedly had a crap marriage; so had my grandmother. So do most people. The pictures just helped me tease out the inevitable trajectory of my impending nuptials. They made me realize that it was not the abysmal rate of success within the institution, or the wall of babies, or the ridiculously low-hanging breasts that scared me. It was that, as glamorous as all that sounds, I knew someone who caused me to wake up to cold sweats would probably not be worth droopy boobs. I did not marry him.
If you want to know if you’re with Mr. Right, break into an old woman’s (preferably Irish with a gravitationally challenged rack) home and stare for a few moments at her shrine of a wall. You’ll know if he’s the one if you can imagine building your own with him—without clutching your sternum for air or checking to ensure that the current latitudinal position of your breasts is still north of the equator.
No comments:
Post a Comment