Dramatis Personae: J

There is a great philosophical truth revealed in the the exercise of trying to describe one's spouse. The nearer one is to something (or someone) the harder it is to say anything meaningful about them. To put it another way, the person nearest to you is the one you know least about; they are at the very least the person you’ve forgotten the most about. I am currently in the terrible position of having resolved to write about my wife, and of course have no idea where to start. Any historical sketch of her (and only her) would have to start with a careful weeding out of me. There is a similar dilemma in talking about religion. The average layperson understands much too little about Christian doctrine, and a little too much about the experience of living Christianity. His description of it (as an abstract idea) is inseparable from his own experience of it. His experience of it may be a fascinating subject, but it is a different question, just as a character sketch of J is a subtly different thing than a sketch of J and myself. Or consider the problem musically; it isn’t tongue-pierced teenagers who can’t hear classical music, but classical musicians. If the trumpets sound the final glories of Beethoven 5, the teenagers, no matter how many holes they have in their ears, will at least hear it with fresh ears. It is the bassoons and the trumpets that will miss out, for the bassoons are wincing under the sound shield. They are too close to the trumpets to the understand them. And the trumpets, of course, are carefully listening to intonation and watching the conductor so as to utterly ignore both and play as loudly as possible. Classical musicians are far too concerned with squeaky reeds and changes in the union contract to hear classical music; that is the audience’s job. Similarly, husbands are often too immersed the accidents (medieval usage) of married life to actually understand their spouse; they only knew who she was before they got to know her.

I’m either long winded or failing to make my point, so consider this another way: if I were to leave tomorrow to be a missionary to Africa, I could send you a meaningful first glance of tribal life there. Being a stranger there, I would marvel at their diet, their strange customs of greeting, and reddish color of their huts. I could tell you they eat goats, they wear goatskin, and the village doesn’t smell great. In four years (about the length of time I’ve been married, thus effectively living as a foreigner in the strange world of the feminine) of living in Africa, I would have lost all the novelties of the new culture. If someone asked me “how’s it going” (that impossible question) the sorts of things that would spring to my mind would be my lost sandal, or perhaps a particularly memorable meal, or how much sleep I was getting. The red huts would be as common as red bricks, the goats as familiar as coats, and the smell (regrettably) as familiar, if not as pleasant, as Tide detergent. With my own life being intertwined with that of the tribespeople, any meaningful description would need to be drawn out of me. The problem of talking about one’s spouse is not only seeing the big picture, but seeing the big picture as if for the first time; the problem of seeing her freshly. With J, a fresh look is like being rolled under a great wave of goodness.

She is the daughter of two music teachers. She started piano nearly before she was out of diapers, and as was the case in most of her childhood endeavors, was precocious. She had a strong appetite for books throughout her entire childhood, and was homeschooled. (She is proud to this day that no one can “tell the difference”) She was unusually shy of adults as a small child, and unusually conversant with them as a teenager. She played softball and followed gymnastics and ice-skating religiously. She has always been on the closest of terms with her two brothers, both younger and both fond of her. Outwardly, she is the model of sense, self-control and politeness; although she’s never shown it to more than a handful of her most intimate friends, she is inwardly a pure romantic. She is, in other words, the quintessential 19^th century literary heroine: sensible, measured, and patient. I suspect, given her family background and personality, that she would have made an excellent governess. In this age, however, she was a music education major, and qualified to major it two instruments, eventually choosing the flute. She rarely enters into debate voluntarily, but speaks formidably well and writes even better. She yearned for friends her entire childhood and found them at RWC. Her relationships with her college friends defined and completed her nearly as much as her marriage. Her marriage, unfortunately, is a sad and beautiful tale wherein a lovely maiden (for she is excessively pretty, though she would never comport herself deliberately for that compliment) marries the first boy that touches her heart at a far too young age (twenty-two) without ever pausing to consider her career or whether she is sufficiently “experienced.” (Whatever the modern usage of that word means.) Surprisingly enough, she still seems rather pleased about the arrangement.