Portrait of a Marriage by the Light of the Microwave

So, when I go to the Festival of Faith & Writing, I drive back and forth between home and Grand Rapids. It's about a 75 minute drive, cheaper than a hotel, and I listen to music or an audio book and generally enjoy myself. One night during the most recent festival in April, I get home late, just as Raider is getting ready to go to bed. I can see how tired he is, how ready he is to sleep. But he also wants to hear about my day, so he follows me into the kitchen to listen to me chatter as I pack the next day's lunch.

I discover that the hoagie rolls are frozen, so I wrap one in a paper towel and pop it into the microwave to thaw. Raider watches me as I press a few beeping buttons and then START.

We are facing each other, and I see his eyes cast sideways at the microwave and then come back to rest on me. Very quick. Hardly noticeable. You would not have noticed it. But I have shared my life with this man for almost 19 years, and I see that glance, and I know what that glance means. It means that I have not microwave-thawed my hoagie roll in the way that he would have done it. He suspects that his way is better. Therefore, he has advice to give me on the subject of microwaving hoagie rolls.

He has also shared his life with me for almost 19 years. He know that I do not want to hear the advice he has to give me. He knows that after starving children, persistent urban and rural poverty, and wanton environmental destruction, there is almost nothing I hate more than unsolicited advice.

He has a habit, this person I love, of making little suggestions about the way I do things. He likes to walk into the kitchen while I'm cooking and stir my sauce, or center the pan more perfectly on the burner. In the car, he wonders why I don't take Service Rd. to Trowbridge and get on 496 instead of going down Okemos Rd. to 96, since the Service Rd. route is just that little bit quicker--he knows, because he has timed it. And so on.

Someday, when he is dead, I will remember his habit of helpful suggestions. I will miss it. I will stand in the kitchen unpacking the groceries and weep because there is no one there to point out that I bought the wrong kind of salsa, or to ask whether I chose the tortillas I did because the store was out of the "good kind."

But, in the meantime, it just drives me nuts.

So. He feels the urge. It is strong, this urge. An instinctive drive, like the one that makes the butterflies migrate or the mother bear protect her cubs. The primal urge to say something to me about the choices I make--the poor choices I make--in hoagie roll thawing. But he knows I don't want him to say it. I am watching him feel the urge. He is watching me watch him. We can both feel the force of it. There is tension in the air; it crackles between us. He is fighting the urge as the seconds tick down on the microwave's timer.

The urge cannot be defeated. He speaks. "Are you familiar," he says carefully, "with the auto-defrost feature?"

"I am," I reply as formally as a witness in Federal court. "I use it quite often."

"Ah," he says.

There is a pause. The microwave's hum is the only sound in the room.

"I really missed you today at the conference," I say. He starts to smile; he knows what's coming. "You are so easy to love at a distance."

And then we're both laughing. And then we are in each other's arms.