Best Father's Day Gift Ever

 

 

Read more...

Fathers Be Good To Your Daughters

 

When my daughters visit, they deposit little pieces of themselves all over our apartment: bras on the back of the bathroom door, empty glasses in the sink, and pretzels on the floor. When they leave, things go missing, like my heart....

I wish you all a Happy Father's Day.  Please stop by and read my father's day piece over at The Huffington Post:  Father Seeks Father

Read more...

The Perfect Couple

My relationship with Paul is amazing because we never fight. 

That’s not entirely true, we rarely fight. I can count on one hand the number of arguments we have had, if that hand was deformed and if it had more than five fingers and less than forty six. But, nobody is counting here. Our arguments are few and far between.  Actually, we fought today.  Although I can’t really say that we fought today, because today we simply were not speaking to each other.  We fought last night when I told him he should wear a T-shirt with a picture of a crab on it to match his attitude instead of that stupid lobster T-shirt.  It was a cheap shot, I’ll admit, but sometimes a little humor can diffuse a tense situation. 

And sometimes, it does not.

I’m not here to say that we are the perfect family, but we are darn near close!  Sometimes I forget all of the painstaking, meticulous and laboriously detailed plans that Paul recounts ad infinitum and occasionally I can be callous when, oh let’s say, I laugh at his coming out song which happens to be “Reflection” by Christina Aguilera.  Remember Disney’s Mulan?  

And sometimes Paul can be less than enthusiastic about my writing projects and offer criticisms such as “I didn’t get it,” or “Does this one pay anything?”  But all in all we are so compatible it is almost scary. 

For example, he loves cars and I love to ride in them. He loves to cook and I like to eat. He loves to clean and I’m a mess.  I could go on and on, but you get the drift.  I’m the yang to his yin, which I suppose means we’re more opposite than alike, but if you think about it the whole yin/yang thing really ties us nicely back to Mulan, doesn’t it? 

Maybe our success as a couple has more to do with our eerily identical sense of humor.  Just the other day, I pulled a pair of Paul’s shorts out of the dryer, put them on and held the waist band out like I had just lost one hundred pounds and let them drop to the floor, then I encouraged him to try and squeeze into a pair of my jeans. We laughed and laughed!  You know now that I think about it I may have been laughing more than Paul, but he always tells me he’s really laughing on the inside when he reads one of my more humorous blog posts.

We are very secure.  That’s what it is when you get right down to it.  I’ll go out with my friends for a “girl’s night out” as Paul calls it and he’s not the least bit jealous.  He knows that I need some time with my friends Sam and Cary and the occasional validation from some drunken guy at a bar who’ll cop a feel.  I’ll come home and tell him how terribly attractive everyone thought I was and he doesn’t bat an eye!  That’s security right there and we have both got it in spades.

In the end we’re not afraid to admit when one of us is wrong.  I know that when Paul picks me up from work tonight and drives me home he’ll be thinking about how lucky he is to have found me.  I’ll go to the gym while he cooks dinner, and he’ll add a little bit of extra love to that meal as the final ingredient. And when I step out of the shower and sit down to a warm meal? 

He’ll apologize.

 
 

Read more...

Turnouts

 

The colors are too vivid, like they vibrate at an undetectable frequency and what we see is something that is at the height of our perception but still less than what is real. We park the car and walk along a gravel road that wanders through the autumn vineyard and we might as well have stepped into a painting. An infinite cerulean blue sky stretched over russet colored grape-vine ridged hills gives way to a luminous chartreuse green carpet of grass. I stretch out my hand to touch the canvassed sky, but this painting moves and dances with the wind.  We can’t help but laugh because the beauty is too much and our hearts might explode from the eternity of it all.

We continue to drive along the Pacific Coast Highway from Bodega Bay towards San Francisco, the road cradled by ocean and fog on our right and wine-soaked rugged mountains to our left pushing our hearts ahead of us. This is California distilled up through the mist and washed by the sun.

The car hugs the road as we climb higher past trees with curling brown cinnamon stick bark and sweet jasmine scented air. Paul does not brake to meet the curves, but shifts the car into a lower gear and it whinnies at the restraint.  With no guard rail between us and the yawning cliff, I close my eyes and lean in towards Paul as if to counter balance the weight of the car should the passenger side wheels suddenly leave the road.

“Have I ever crunched you?” Paul says.

“Not yet,” I reply weakly.

He laughs and continues the climb, sure of himself and of the road.  I manage to open my eyes and peak through the window.  My stomach drops into the ocean below.

I close my eyes again and think about all of the roads we have travelled that crisscross and connect this ocean to the one on the other side of the country. The roads that slip through rows of tobacco fields and corn stalks flickering by like the spokes of a wheel towards Eastern North Carolina and into the dunes of the outer banks; the long road that threads together the lonely pearls of keys off the southern tip of Florida; Mile Road that connects my heart to the rocky beaches of Maine and the gravel road in between two endless vineyards.  All of those roads and Paul has never crunched me.

He pulls the car over onto a rocky outcropping and turns off the ignition.  We step out of the car and stretch tensed muscles, pushing our arms towards the sky.  Paul walks to the edge and peers over the clouds that drift below us. I hang back afraid of the precipitous edge.  I look at his fearless face bathed in the setting sun and slowly step towards him as he holds out his hand.

“I won’t let you go,” he says.

I stand next to him and say “I know you never will.”

  

Read more...

The Enemy Within

It has been a tough week, but we are tougher.  We are Boston and nothing will keep us down.  Please read and share my piece on the Boston Marathon Bombing over at the Huffington Post.

The Enemy Within

 

Read more...

Sometimes

Happy Birthday Husband

Sometimes, when I look at him it’s as if I’m already looking at a memory.  The image is soft and faded and tinged at the edges with a honeyed poignancy.  Like I have taken a picture with my eyes and stowed it away for safekeeping in an old box in the attic of my mind to be rummaged through one day. But the signals have become crossed and instead of seeing what is before my eyes, I’ll see what is behind them.

Sometimes, when the filtered moonlight sifts through the blinds painting horizontal shadows on the bedroom wall and I am resting in his warmth I’ll listen to him breathe. In the morning half-light he’ll hold onto me and say “Five more minutes.” And I’ll wish for five hundred more years.

Sometimes, I’ll look back and see the boy I never knew in the face of the man I do.

Sometimes, I’ll look past the curve of the earth into our future.  Two old men, grey and stooped holding hands.  Lying in a hospital bed one curled up like the letter “C” next to the other, vowing to never let go. 

Sometimes, I’ll wish that we had more time together and then I’ll be thankful for every single minute of every single day.  Especially on this day when the sum time of his life is celebrated.

 

Read more...

The Gay Marriage Slippery Slope

Politicians warn of dire consequences, but what will happen when marriage equality is legalized? Read about it here in my new Huffington Post piece.

Beware of the Gay Marriage Slippery Slope

Read more...