I Like Being Married Treasured Traditions, Rituals, and Stories

Chapter One Marriage Is Before you become interested in seeing the light, to you mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after you get an insight into reality, mountains to you are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; but after this when you really attain the place of peace, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters. --Old Zen saying Same old slippers, Same old rice, Same old glimpse of Paradise. --William James Lampton My husband is my best friend. When I wake up and look at him next to me, I smile. He is a good man and a gift of God to me. --Carmen Rodriguez Monticello, New York Squinching By Phyllis A. Tickle One pleasantly cool morning a few weeks ago, I was lying in bed not quite awake and not quite asleep, but just drifting in that state which is halfway between the two. I was thinking of nothing more significant and meaningful than how good the blanket felt up around my shoulders and that the tip of my nose was just cold enough to feel good too. In the half-light seeping around the edges of the bedroom shades, I could tell from the faint smile on his face that Sam was floating in the same delicious suspension as I was. At the time, he was on his back, which meant that I was lying in my favorite position as well. On my left side with my knees drawn up half under his buttocks and my torso shoved solidly up against his, I had my left arm tucked under me and my neck cradled on top of his outstretched right arm. My right hand lay flat on top of his chest, secured by the tight, warm grip of his left one. It was, as I have said, a perfectly lovely moment. I would even say a perfectly ordinary one, were it not that something in me rebels at the notion of the words lovely and ordinary being in the same sentence together without any explanation. Be that as it may, however, we were lying there in customary positions and totally familiar circumstances when it happened. I was watching Sam's face, trying to gauge just how awake he really was and how much longer we were going to be able to fend off reality by lying there like truant children. He still had his eyes closed--a good and hopeful sign, I thought--and his breathing was still reassuringly even and deep . . . or it was, until abruptly he did this thing. He squinched. Yes, he squinched. The side of his nose from its beginning at the inside edge of his cheek to the peak of its bridge wrinkled up like corduroy. Not another facial muscle moved, not another piece of skin twitched, just that thin, tightly drawn bit from cheek base to bridge. "That's not possible," I thought and realized that I was abruptly awake. Then just as I had almost persuaded myself that no one could even do what I thought he had done, Sam Tickle up and did it again . . . which pretty much says it all for me. That is, I had been lying beside that same man in that same position for almost fifty years and he had never once squinched before. I mean, just as I was beginning to think I had it all figured out at last, the man goes and takes up squinching. I was appalled and, for several days thereafter, I continued to be offended . . . not so much at Sam, you understand, as at a system that lets a person change his personal habits after fifty years and not even have to apologize for it. I got up grumpy and stayed that way for a good five minutes before the whole thing struck me as being as funny as it was annoying. When I was a maturing teenager, my mother used to say, "Marriage is" when considering such moments and she'd stop the sentence right there. For all my pestering, she would never add either predicate nominative or predicate adjective to her statement. She would just shake her head and simply repeat "Marriage is" as if that were the whole sum of the thing. Since the squinching episode, I have begun to accept the authenticLeach, Michael is the author of 'I Like Being Married Treasured Traditions, Rituals, and Stories' with ISBN 9780385502320 and ISBN 038550232X.