Forty
Growing up, Sarah and I would play St. Louis in a Box, a seemingly unlicensed Monopoly clone with iconic properties like The Arch, Union Station, and Anheuser-Busch. Theoretically either player was able to buy properties and develop them with houses and hotels, though my sister, who proudly played as the musical note, always relentlessly crushed me, the pathetic baseball mitt. The game lasted for hours and hours only because she'd offer me usurious loans to extend that blissful moment when she was winning and I was losing.
For both of us, though, the real treat of the game was the trivia cards. While our genetic inheritance found dissent more often than consensus, we both had a deep desire to know — and at that age, especially to know something that the other didn't. While Sarah had lived a few early years in St. Louis, I knew almost nothing about the place save what I'd learned on short trips and by inference from the ways that my parents' Midwestern upbringing separated them from the native Californians surrounding us: a preponderance of casseroles, a stalwart Lutheranism, a collection of faux German traditions, and a love of Ford cars among a proliferation of Hondas and Toyotas. The trivia cards asked straightforward questions about the Cardinals, Budweiser, and frozen custard — mystical Midwestern knowledge that I had to learn by sheer repetition having been mostly stripped of firsthand experience.
Our favorite question, though, asked about the pronunciation of the east-west freeway that ran through the heart of Downtown St. Louis. Whoever got to proudly yell out, "HIGHWAY FARTY!" often seemed to be the real winner of the game irrespective of wealth or penury. In those days, despite Bible camps and Sunday sermons, forty was not the number of days of desert wanderings or Jesus's post-resurrection appearances — it was the name of a concrete spear of freeway aimed like a missile at Busch Stadium, pronounced with Midwestern decency and a hint of flatulence.
Today the form of forty has taken a new shape as my parents celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. Summing up forty years of marriage is like weighing dreams or measuring memories: The sheer accumulation of one minute of married life is an infinite universe ever expanding, and the accrual of years forms a vast territory that no one could plumb or map except the two intrepid and intertwined travelers each holding hands with each other and their God.
Perhaps marriage is a sort of homeostasis — a careful balance of two persons living as one. From 1983 to today, a mustache is lost and gray hairs gained; chicken pot pie erased from the dinner menu and enchiladas added; a tolerance for cold eradicated and a love of far off places established. Marriage spreads itself into every nook and cranny of being, slowly replacing tempers and preferences and selfishness and envy and strife with patience and peace and understanding and self-gift, not to mention quaint Christmas villages, Bible studies, children, and grandchildren. What's most curious about marriage is the thing that doesn't make sense until you're in it, that the question about why you love the other person is unanswerable in any other way than this: "Because you're you."
Forty years of meandering is more pleasant with the mission of getting your spouse to heaven — and much harder, too. Nothing more quickly erases arrogance and eliminates pride than marriage, which is the home of love and humility, a place where we can confirm each day that, indeed, we are not good enough. No better place than marriage to practice reconciliation and forgiveness, to utter nunc coepi — "Now I begin" — falling a thousand times a day and rising a thousand times in turn to be who we ought to be before our spouse and our God. Marriage is like a circle unwound into a spiral: We come again and again to the same moments, the same conflicts, the same flaws, only this time we have grown deeper and are called higher.
This number forty has been walking alongside me even before today, as my brother-in-law Jason died one month ago today at the age of forty. This sort of unexpected death leaves one sifting through cliches for truth and hating the limits of language and the triteness of text — even uttering unexpected death makes you feel like a fool, for who does not expect themselves and everyone they love to die? Gone too soonfeels apt, but too soon for what? Everything happens for a reason provides comfort in the causal order as well as a reminder that many of the reasonable things happening are quite awful indeed. Time heals all wounds, but first it binds you to an uneven gear that meticulously counts out long minutes and short days or short hours and long weeks, each moment a mess both stretched out to infinity and contracted to single point, shifting focus from enormity to insignificance, from fear and trembling to wonder and terror.
And then there's this problem that memory immediately fails. I started trying to recall conversations, count up the minutes we spent together, create a reverse chronological history of our relationship — and what's left is less consequential than the bits and baubles I have stuffed in a box in the room we rarely go into. I can remember two or three board game nights with some clarity, but what did he say? A drive along Topanga Canyon en route to Santa Monica with the gas tank too low; a poker night with his college roommates; family photos in St. Louis; saccharine punch at Knott's Berry Farm; hugs at hospital bedsides when the bad things were new and less clear; a homemade dice rolling game featuring a plunger; many rides in a Jeep; a Rascal Flatts concert; a book of hikes in the Austin area; a direct-to-DVD special featuring, inexplicably, the Jetsons and Wrestlemania. As little as it all is, there's enough here to remind me of him and the 18 years we knew each other, but his essence is lost, untouchable. I keep seeing tall folks wearing pastel plaid button downs around town and thinking there he is, only to be reminded of the stupidly simple yet utterly unacceptable fact about death that it means you won't see someone again. Not here.
I used to treat my teaching like a magic trick. I'd share something strange with my students and tell them to hold on — it would all come together at the end of our two hour lesson. An obscure Latin passage; a picture of cannon balls on a battlefield; a radio transmission blasted through the cosmos. But it was all contrived. There's sense in the world, sure, but it doesn't come in two-hour English lessons or thousand-word essays. These days, I end my teaching with a question I still have. Most things still don't make sense. Maybe what we started with wasn't even the right place to begin our inquiry. Perhaps Highway Farty doesn't lead anywhere at all and trivia is just that, a place where three roads meet and you sometimes take the wrong one. Maybe a marriage still has questions after two years or fifteen or forty, or maybe even after all that time we didn't even have the right questions let alone the right answers. I don't know what to make of any of it. How is it that difficult moments are when people are most often to find faith and to lose it?