Here’s the best advice I’ve ever heard on knowing if someone’s the right guy to marry: marry the man who respects and values his mother. Not just loves her, as few mortals can admit to not loving their Mums, even the Mums who messed them up. Run, don’t walk, away from those who love their mothers, but treat them with distance, disdain, disgust, contempt, anger, or even the seemingly-safe nonchalance.
Good advice, that. I didn’t take it. Not once.
I make it a rule to marry prolific readers, men with collectible first editions, home libraries, collections of Shakespeare on onion-skin pages, collections of Rachel Carson and Michael Moore and Al Gore used as angry manifestos, original language copies of Freud, Goethe and Nietzsche, plus multiple translations (which they then read line by line to see what different esteemed translators make of a certain word). Men whose Amazon one-click is linked to their business account, men who read voraciously online but never an ebook, men who only enter a public library to wait for me to pick up my books on hold, as the pleasure of cracking open their own copy, even if the only available version was used, is too great to subsume under the communist ideal of shared books. I marry men who go back to tomes and re-read them, men whose lottery fantasy is to have sufficient undisturbed time to read The Iliad and The Odyssey. I marry reading snobs.
Well, mostly I marry reading snobs. I imposed this rule using, as do all young people whose early relationships tank, Sesame Street logic. “One of these guys is not like the other . . . ” The way to success next time around is to find the opposite to the last guy who broke my heart. That guy was short? Next time I’ll only date tall guys. First guy made a lot of money? Next time I’ll only date underpaid and overeducated guys committed to saving something or someone grand. And so on. My first college love was a sandy haired loyal-as-a-golden-retriever business major who never wanted to sit and read. My last college love was a duplicitous Kerouac-obsessed poetry professor who, if I stop to think of it, didn’t write poetry and didn’t make, so didn’t keep, promises, which meant he felt free to sleep with many of his students. I still have a small volume of Ferlinghetti love poems, which is better than any piece of chipped stone jewelry any other never-meant-to-be gave me, so all in all it was worth it. And I did get an A.
No surprise I have a lot of books. Books with covers and pages, more books than dishes, more books than clothes, more books than everything other than jpeg photo files.
It took me a few days to wonder about the book titled Anger that was resting atop some of my all-time favorites, the ones which have priority and grace my living room, so that I am forever reminded that the world can produce such things as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Marisa de los Santos’ Love Walked In and Belong to Me, Georgia O’Keefe’s Some Memories of Drawings, Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story, a few how-to improve-your-marriage books, not yet read, collections of e.e. cummings, and Adrienne Rich, and a book of 100 easy-to-memorize well-known poems that I read out loud to my son when I was pregnant – magnifying the sound through my expanding abdomen with some device sold to pregnant reading snobs that purported to pipe in the sound of my voice in such a way as to be heard over the rushing cacophony of liquid whooshings and valve openings and closings and what I was told, and will never know if it’s true, is as loud as a downtown New York subway in there.
There it was, though. Anger. Not filed in with the books. Just resting on top. I’d thought I’d loaned it to a friend. I thought it was mine. It seemed both perfectly reasonable to be there, as it is my book, but also out of place. Had I picked it up again and put it there without knowing? Had my current reading-snob husband picked it up because we’d just had a doozy of a disconnection?
It sat for a few days. The anger in the household swelled beyond the bookcase. To the back rooms of the house. To closed-doors, wait-until-the-child-is-asleep acrimony. To cold freeze under the covers. To bland and functional good night pecks robbed of even the pretense of kindness or love. It was time for the book.
There’s something to this universe of ours, the one where, if you can’t quite get out of your own way, something comes along to smack you a few steps further on your growth path. A Buddhist-book asking me, ever so gently, from the sweet spot on top of my favorite books, to take a look. Open the cover. It says I can reduce my suffering. Says I can practice how to transform my anger. Says I can experience freedom.
Oh. Stop being so damned bone-headed. [The book doesn’t say this directly, but I get the gist].
Some gifts are thwacks across the forehead. They convey what no one is ever told these days: “knock it off.” This was a friend’s stealth return of a long-term loan. A gift from above. It came just in time.