Serendipity

In June of 1995. I was at my high school art show when a woman took a fancy to my drawing. She found a teacher and wanted to thank me personally for my piece. It was a baby in utero, in realistic detail, inside the sun. Truth be told, I smoked a lot of weed back then and it seemed like a cool idea. So, I drew it. She had just had a baby in February and it meant something special to her. I heard her talking to her husband, but he wouldn’t let her buy it. He looked irritated, while she looked awestruck. I had never struck a chord with my art, music, or writing. This felt good and I threw myself into art more than my other creative tendencies because of it. I thought it was a fluke. I was happily disproved.

In the spring of 1997, I had another art show at my high school. It was my senior year, so I had to dig deep to put out my best work. I had only one piece to show. I was extremely inebriated so I wasn’t understanding the situation when a married couple asked to buy it. I thought they wanted the original. They wanted a lithograph, I later found out. They offered $50, I said no. They offered $100, I said no. They stopped bidding at $350 for a copy of my work. They were both frustrated and more than a little angry about it. I was unphased. It always stuck out in my mind though. In 1997 $350 would’ve paid a month’s rent for a one bedroom.

By 2001 I was working at a mall downtown. I worked in a custom T-shirt shop. I put funny saying or non-copywritten images on T-shirts for a not so reasonable price. My boss told me to make a unique custom shirt of my own, in an effort to enhance the brand and show off our skills. I chose “I heart toxic waste.” I used a red felt heart instead of spelling it to match the shirt Val Kilmer wore in “Real Genius.” I wore it every shift thereafter. It was basically my work uniform. One day, I was on my way out to the parking garage for a smoke, I had just closed the gate to the shop and was heading toward my nicotine dream when I was stopped and questioned by two very LDS (Mormon) looking women. They had old fashioned dresses and hair and kept asking me about my shirt. They thought it was hilarious. I thought Real Genius was an R rated film and hence unlawful for them to have watched. It wasn’t. It was PG.

One woman was pregnant with what appeared to be Paul Bunyan’s child. She was mostly quiet, as her friend led the conversation. I tried to be polite so I could take my break without getting into trouble for taking too long. I thought nothing of it at the time. I had no idea the three incidents were connected, but they were.

By 2010 I was working nights in a call center. I didn’t have any time to socialize, so I met a woman online. We had an instant connection. We were likeminded in many ways, and on opposite ends of the spectrum on others. But she was smart. She was quick. She was capable. When we finally met at a big chain restaurant. We would’ve gone out a week earlier but her “kids were sick.” They weren’t, she had cold feet. Our connection only intensified. She asked me out the next day to go shopping for her youngest’s birthday. I called her one night and asked her a question I could have Googled if it hadn’t been for my internet being down. I asked her who The Roman Emperor was when Christ was crucified. She was a history major. My guesses were very close to being accurate. I knew the emperors but was foggy on the timeline. She was impressed. She was quite taken with me after that. Even if it meant I called her at three am. It was October of 2010. We were married by the next July.

Living in a duplex, we fought over money mostly. How to pay the rent, how to calm the three kids down after they came home to a three day pay or vacate, how to afford the copays on our medications, these were the daily obstacles to overcome. We have very different ways of dealing with the problems that invariably arose. This caused more conflict. We had very different views on religion in general and the one we ascribed to specifically. More friction. The friction mounted, more causes and more intense conflict. We were becoming flat out toxic and vicious with each other.

We had promised, taken an oath, when we got engaged to go to marriage counseling if things got bad. And they were bad. We both agreed to make an appointment and follow through on our promise. We did it almost as a token gesture, we were both ready to let go and move on. But we didn’t. We went. We had ten sessions paid for due to my wife’s insurance.

We sat down on the cherry red couch and each went through the problems we were having. An issue I had was when we were looking for a tree skirt for our meager Christmas tree, I suggested just using newspaper as I did growing up. It makes for easy clean-up. You just remove the tree roll up the newspaper and the needles along with it. My wife erupted in a moment of anger saying that to do so would be “ghetto.” Meaning trashy. She had no idea how poor I was growing up. The reason I write as well as I do is because I grew up so poor all I had to play with were words. Whereas she was upper middle class growing up. The different upbringings and typical solutions to problems were natural sources of friction and tension.

One of her biggest issues was my penchant for cutting her off and talking over her. I still struggle with that, though I have improved over the years. And my penchant for storming out, without telling her where I was going or when I would return. She was afraid I would never return each time I stormed off. A few times she had thought I only came back to pack up my stuff. So, we laid out ground rules. I had to return within two hours if I stormed off in anger. I had to tell her I would return and when, and where I was going before I left. I had to let her finish what she was saying before responding to her no matter how desperately I wanted to respond in the moment.

The biggest lessons I learned were that the brunt of the work was to be done day to day rather than epiphanies on that cherry red couch. The issues we both had were chronic, not a matter of a crisis. Chronic issues require effort to correct every day. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We still stick to those ground rules seven years later and we will indefinitely. We hold each other and ourselves continually accountable to those ground rules. Another lesson is that, bless his heart, John Lennon was full of it. Love is not all you need. It’s just not. I’m quite certain we have all have had relationships where love was in abundance, but it still just did not work. Two people can love each other silly and have things fall apart.

It is sad but true.

Another realization was that a marriage is a partnership. It is not transactional. It’s not pure love, rainbows, and unicorn glitter. There’s grunt work that needs to be done day after day. There are fights that happen even in the best and healthiest of relationships. It’s how we deal with that conflict that makes the difference between what’s healthy and what’s toxic. We validate and even repeat what the other is saying to make sure we understand what they mean, what they feel, and what’s behind the words they say. It’s the Socratic method, and it works. We get through these problems by hashing it out, however unpleasant, with a focus on how to resolve it. Even if that just means validating feelings without the need to fix it. Some problems require a new outlook since it may be impossible to resolve them. Not everything can be fixed.

It’s also worth knowing that not every marriage should be saved. Some people aren’t just bad to each other, they are bad for each other. Sometimes it is damaged beyond repair. Thankfully, ours was not. We got better. We have improved thanks to our ground rules and I can honestly say that each year is better than the last. Yay for us. But things were about to take a tragic turn. My wife’s best friend since the tenth grade, Nancy, was diagnosed with stage three cancer. Her prognosis was grim. And she fought hard, but lost her battle. My wife was a mess, she’d breakdown and sob hysterically multiple times a day for months. After that the crying fits were fewer, but still there. After we got back home from Nancy’s funeral my wife started sharing her fondest memories with Nancy. There were twenty=three years of memories to sift through. And we did, for a long time.

She talked about how sweet Nancy was to take her out to the theater as she was eight months pregnant with her youngest in the summer of 2001. She said on their way from the food court of a nearby mall, they spotted “some skinny guy with an “I hear toxic waste” T-shirt. I nearly fell over. We had met before we started dating. Then she found the drawings I had saved since high school and told me she was the one who was so taken with them. And that mine was the only piece her and her ex-husband could both agree was good enough to buy. And that they were so upset I wouldn’t sell them a copy.

Then we talked about that mall since we both went so often in the late ‘90s. I told her all the places I worked in the mall. The T-shirt shop, the picture framing store, and the incense kiosk. She said she loved that kiosk because she has a thing for incense. She told me that there was “some kid who told Tess (her oldest) made up stories that I had to correct her from repeating or believing.” Again, it was me.

I simply worked the cash register there. Most days were boring because incense is not big business in SLC. However, my future wife would take her three children, ages six, four, and two. The two youngest were bundled up in a stroller, while Tess, the six-year-old, was allowed to roam free. Tess was a highly active child, not just physically but mentally. She was talkative. She wouldn’t stop talking long enough to breath until she nearly passed out.

So, when my future wife would come to the kiosk, Tess would talk to me as her mother shopped. My future wife apologized and seemed embarrassed by her talkative child. Likely because in Utah the prevailing ethos regarding children is that they should been seen, not heard. I, however, loved talking to littles. Mainly because I can pull their leg, tell them really anything, and they enthusiastically believe it. They’re fun to mess with.

Tess asked me once “Why are old pictures in black and white instead of color?” I explained that it was because “You see, in the olden days, the sun’s rays were different, obviously. Which meant now we can see color and we live in much cooler times.” Then she asked, “If that’s true, why aren’t black and white pictures now color?” And I politely explained that’s “Because they were in color then. It’s just that there weren’t any colors more than black or white.” She said that “Old paintings were in color so old pictures should be too.” The kid was too crafty for any six-year-old I had ever come in contact with. At this point in the proceedings I was going to swing at this curve ball and hope for the best. I said that’s because “Paints, especially old paints, were usually made from plants like flowers.” I told her “Since there were no such things as black and white flowers (I hoped she wouldn’t challenge that one) so that’s why old paintings became colorized under the new rays of the changed sun.”

She said “Oh, that makes sense.”

I told her a new story, or a few, every time my future wife shopped at my kiosk. My wife later told me Tess and her siblings would play I spy on drives around town. All Tess’s clues were about me. My future wife had to ban me as a subject for the game. I walked Tess down the aisle when she got married and she still remembers much of that time.

My wife and I love telling these stories of serendipity. But though it may have been fate that brought us together, it was grit, determination, and good old-fashioned work that has kept us together. I am convinced hard times don’t build character; I think they merely reveal it. It’s like boiling water, it hardens eggs, and softens pasta. The water is neutral. What matters is what you’re made of. What I found was a life partner, not just a lover. I found someone who has not given up on me when anyone else would have.

Love can be sweet, or it can be cruel. It can make you lose your mind. But it might just save your life. I know it did mine.