I'm on a plane right now, an unlikely place to write this blog. But since I'm attempting to produce a sort of 2011 wrap up, maybe it's not the unlikeliest of places. After all, I have made four transatlantic trips during the past year. Since I'm not doing business on both sides, or either one, of the atlantic, that's quite a lot of back and forth. This is not the blog post I had intended, had started writing in my head for months, gathering up mental "notes-to-self" of the monumental and the anecdotal which is worthy to be included in my 2011 greatest hits. But then, that things don't turn up as planned (and as noted-to-self before falling asleep) really shouldn't surprise us anymore, should it?
I am on my way to Israel for the fourth time this year, and I am going sheerly from Sehnsucht to my family (there is no English noun that agrees with the notion of "I miss you", other than "longing" maybe but that is way too melancholic. This linguistic misfortune, which has not changed since the last time I lamented it, MUST be rectified. (Okay, fine, I apparently did not actually compose that lament anywhere outside my head. Hence lack of link to former blog post.)). That, and also because DH is on a road-trip with our (his? ours.) best friend, driving through the official South, and it made no sense for me to stay home alone in Chicago, right? I didn't join the road-trip for a number of reasons which made sense at the time, including "8 hours in the car a day? I don't think so" and also I was not in the best of health, and got anxious thinking about being so far out of my comfort zone, especially in a part of the country where grilled red meat (which I don't and can't eat) is an essential part of the diet. So, you see, I would have been a bore and a pest and generally would have had fun an insufficient percentage of the time and spent the rest worrying and whining. Don't ever take me on a road-trip, by the way.
And it makes sense, just the two of them bonding and doing guys-stuff like grilling red meat and drinking whiskey and bourbon and smoking and going to the best restaurant in America outside of NYC and checking into a fancy hotel for the occasion and, wait a minute.
... But! I am TOTALLY cool with that. Yes. And also, totally jealous (in all senses of the word).
ANYWAY.
I am on the plane, and trying to read Geraldine Brooks' MARCH, but reading in a long overnight flight is arguably harder than reading on the subway. Invariably, there is a crappy movie screened (that is, on those old boeings that don't have individual screens. I didn't know these boeings still existed, either). Invariably, seeing it mute with the Hebrew titles just makes it lamer. Invariably, it is really really crappy, in the most banal of Hollywoodesque-misogynistic ways possible. Seriously, Ryan Gosling is, half the time, parading his mostly naked self (ok fine, I can LIVE with that), the other half, getting girls to sleep with him by using truly unsophisticated punchlines. Then he finds his soulmate (barf). It also stars Julianne Moore, and that fact just makes me sad. So, whenever something distracts me from my book, most often some pathetically uttered announcement about duty free items for sale on board! Ladiesangentlmmnnn!, I involuntarily raise my eyes from the page and get sucked into those platitudes. And nothing could be more different than what I'm reading, a "prequel" to Little Women that tells the life of their absent father Mr. March, away in the South during the civil war. Right now, he is describing in hindsight the time when he had just met his future wife. "How one longs, when in love, for a glimpse of the beloved". I mean, come on, that could have been a line out of the Phaedrus, right?
And I'm thinking, I don't even find Ryan Gosling particularly attractive. Indeed, he is, empirically, not-my-type (way too, well, big), and DH, empirically (more in terms of crushes than actual ex-boyfriends, though) is. But I don't have a type anymore, I think to myself, because I suddenly feel myself ten years from now loving my then 45-year-old husband. Excuse my sappiness. Really I have gone too far. But I'm sitting here in the sky, sleep deprived, having mulled over the PHAEDRUS for heavenssake for the last week, half worrying my husband is acting out a very rated R fantasy in Charleston, SC, and I have this Recognition. The familiarity, the comfort, of his body even while I know it's going to change. The thought now of ever falling out of love with him overcomes me in its inconceivability.
We've been together for seven years. I get new gray hairs and he seems to be pleased with the fact (sappy, barf, cut it out). I've been feeling older, feeling old – and writing about it here – for a while now, and it has to do with N's death and that I'm rapidly approaching not only my thirties but her-age-when-she-died. But lately I've been thinking more in terms of growing-old-with: I've spent my twenties with DH. And they are very nearly spent.
Our first year together was a year of Sehnsucht and long distance phone calls.
A night or two ago, with DH in the mountains of NC and I at home in the last throes of avoiding-my-Phaedrus-paper-deadline, we spoke on the phone. I suddenly had a violent moment of recognition: I heard in his voice his-seven-years-ago-voice. And it wasn't like seeing a younger face through the wrinkles and added freckles and gray hair and under-eye sagging. It was the same voice. His voice has not changed. (Has mine?)
I realized, there truly is something about the voice that is the core of our being.
I realized, there truly is something about the voice that is the core of our being.
Momentous moment of 2011, no. 1.
