Happy Anniversary

  

After 35 years of marriage, this is mostly what I want: to chop vegetables at the dining room table while Dawn is putting together the pasta in the kitchen.

I pick up a Japanese eggplant from the cutting board and turn around, pretending that it’s a gun. Dawn laughs. I chop some more vegetables. She yells at my back from the other room that the music is too loud. I pretend not to hear. It’s Paul Simon on the CD player, but I’m not really paying attention to him either. I’m mostly trying not to leave slices of my finger on the cutting board.

At some point, Dawn tells me to go down to the basement for a couple of onions. Later she tells do something with the goat cheese. I have to ask her again what she meant because I wasn’t really listening. And then she tells me. Again. And then she tells me to get some parsley from the garden. About a third cup. When I come back with a small handful of parsley, she sends me back for another small handful. “Yes, chef!”

When Dawn and I cook together, I’m always the sous chef, she’s always the exec. We both like it that way.

I get to be the man opening the jar of Kalamata olives. I get to chop vegetables. I get to take the scraps out to the compost pile. She makes sure things come together when they need to come together. We both said ‘I do’ and now we’re doing it.

The words Dawn and I exchange when we’re cooking together are entirely insignificant. They are neither prose nor poetry. We simply punctuate the air with a word or two at a time for emphasis. It’s the doing that matters.

Chopping eggplant and squash, onions and peppers. And garlic, plenty of garlic. A few words back and forth just to help move things along. And yet I think it’s those few words and sentences – spoken without even our noticing – that weave our lives together. Without those few words - without the repetition of doing things together using merely incidental words - there is no marriage. So there will be thousands - maybe millions - of those incidental words spoken over the life of our marriage. But nobody’s counting. Or even really listening much of the time.

It’s like this. You pick up a word. Take a fragment of a sentence. Put vegetables in a skillet, turn up the heat, and soon you have ratatouille. Slice a loaf of ciabatta in half and toast it in the oven. Add goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes and Kalamata olives to hot pasta, and soon the two of you are eating out on the patio, telling each other how good the food tastes.

And so there we were. On a mild evening in August with the sun going down behind the neighbor’s trees, words had been strung together in slightly longer strings as we ate together on the patio, but it still wasn’t about the talking. It’s just ratatouille.

And that’s mostly what I want.