LETTERS FROM HOME: TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH A WOMAN IN PERPETUAL MOTION

Nov. 20, 1997

Dear Julie,

After four years, DC is still an amazement to me. Often awake by 5 or 6 a.m., cleaning this or that or doing paperwork or running to the store before she starts work. Coming home for a hurried dinner before heading off to some kind of meeting.

Last night she returned from a planning session for our 30th high school reunion shortly before I got off work at 9. As she wiped down the stove, she described which classmates are still shy and which ones she still can't remember. Then she capped the night by vacuuming, mopping the kitchen floor and making curtains for a Christmas display the historical society is planning.

Planning, vacuuming, planning, mopping.

I just wanted to slip some Kahlua into a cup of coffee and myself onto the couch. Instead, I straightened up the living room and reassured Hank and Lucy that the whirlwind would slow down in awhile.

I read that men who do housework have lower heart rates, are less stressed and in better health than those who don't. These men also are likely to be more engaged in their marriage than men who don't do housework.

To a male willing to own his slovenliness, this is either dangerous female propaganda or the awful truth. So I washed two loads of clothes this morning. Guess it's more of a longterm effect.

DC's perpetual motion is in her genes. Her father is famous for not wasting time. Sometimes at the family cabin, he pulls a lawnmower behind him as he's walking down to the river to fish or check his minnow trap. He just mows that single strip and another on the way back. It makes sense, of course, but never would occur to me to mix the two activities: fishing and lawnmowing.

DC is an amazement and a conundrum. Raised on classical music, she likes heavy metal. She grew up in the '60s but from time to time when a song comes on the radio I have to remind her that those are the Doors or the Rolling Stones. We heard a band play "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and she asked if I thought it was an original. But she recognizes Jimi Hendrix's guitar in an instant. DC has absorbed the culture through her own very idiosyncratic filter.

Maybe we all do. She thinks it strange that I never read "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." While we're at it, I'll confess to skipping the entire "Hobbit" phenomenon. I've listened to friends recount the magical adventures and I know the names of the principal characters, but I wasn't really there for it. My flower child credentials are discredited.

These are just the ephemera of our lives, anyway. What counts is the stuff in the heart. The charm of seeing her dance with the dogs or soothe a scared child at her office.

DC's afraid sometimes, too. I can reassure. She is working out some of the same issues I am. Things like standing up for yourself, saying no, believing in yourself, forgiveness.

In that way we serve each other as mirrors. And I know when things she does or says bother me they are simply my own unfaced demons popping up.

I awoke this morning with the words of another old song in my head. "Time after time, I tell myself that I'm, so lucky to be loving you." I pay attention to messages from dreamland.

I take this one as a reminder of my blessings, and to pay more attention to the vaccuum cleaner.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.