8-Year Anniversary

Lynnette and I got married 8 years ago today. So obviously, this:

No matter how awkward you are, you’ll probably never be as misunderstood as Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Many view the fork in Frost’s famous poem as a metaphor for making a difficult decision. In the end, the speaker chooses the less conventional of the two routes, a decision that has supposedly “made all the difference.” The poem is a metaphor for decision-making, but it has nothing to do with the “right” or “non-traditional” choice. The poem is about how shitty it is to have to make choices at all. Making choices is the death of options. Frost wrote it in the title.

The speaker feels regret because what he really wants is to be able to travel both paths, but knows he can’t. While the last stanza of the poem has always intimated that there was some kind of fundamental difference between the two paths, this is not so:

…though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same, and both (paths) that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. 

The paths are essentially the same. He does not want to choose because opting for one precludes the traveling of the other. This is the speaker’s true dilemma: he wants it both ways. In the present, he doesn’t know where either path will lead him, but knows in the future he can only experience one. That’s how he gets to the last stanza.

He already knows what’s going to happen in the future. Years from now, he’ll romanticize this decision and retroactively claim that it was absolutely critical when the truth is his decision-making process was terribly primitive. He’ll never truly know if his choice “made all the difference” because he’ll only have knowledge of the single path he chose (and all the subsequent ones). That’s how choices work: way leads on to way. There will be no chance for comparison: that’s the alternate universe everyone talks about.  That’s the road not taken.

You’re in the woods, there’s fork in the road. You have to choose if you want to get out of the woods eventually, to take a bath, to eat, not get eaten by a bear, etc. In Frost’s scenario, the options are basically the same which means your decision is more or less arbitrary; you’re making a call based on the available information, then hoping for the best. No one wants to be wrong. We all want to look back and feel and say and tell others (but mostly ourselves) that we absolutely nailed all the key decisions in our lives, that we knew exactly what we were doing. But that’s why the sigh in the last stanza. That’s what he’ll tell everyone, only he’ll be lying.

Because I am the type of person for whom hypothetical situations are often much more fascinating than reality, I can relate to Frost’s wanderer. What If? was always one of my favorite games. What if I had married my college girlfriend? What if Lynnette and I broke up? I wasn’t necessarily wishing for a different life, I just wanted to know what that different life would have been like.

Five minutes before I asked Lynnette to marry me, my body got jittery. My hands started to sweat. My mouth got dry. The same thing happened as I stood in the courtyard of the Halekulani when I saw our seated guests rise for Lynnette. It was the fear of commitment, the fear of having to choose and therefore exhaust all other options. I would know Lynnette and only Lynnette. I would know this life and only this life. It was the same fear Frost’s hiker felt as he stood at that fork in the road. But I got lucky. I didn’t have to decide which path to take. Instead, I chose who I was going to walk the rest of my paths with. If you are in love, or have a wonderful family or amazing friends, then you know what I mean. Sometimes, the where, how, and when doesn’t matter all that much if you’re traveling with people you love.

Happy Anniversary, Lynnette. We shall be telling this with smiles and laughter somewhere ages and ages hence: we had no idea what the hell we were doing, but we decided to do it together, and that has made all the difference.

Way Past My Bedtime

*It seems like a lifetime ago, but once upon a time, I was a nocturnal creature. This state of being wasn’t entirely by choice; that’s just what people did in college. There was rarely a reason because there didn’t need to be one. It was during this time of my life that I discovered I do my best thinking either in the shower or alone at night. I have no idea where this entry is going. I’m up because I’m waiting for my Candy Crush lives to regenerate.

I haven’t requested tickets in forever.

*I don’t know how many games of Candy Crush I’ve played today. What I do know is that at this precise moment, I have no lives on my phone, iPad, and computer. I have been stuck on level 350 for over a month, but I am not exactly sure how much more. It has come to the point where I don’t remember playing any other level. I just give 350 as many shots as I can fit into my day, knowing that I will likely not pass it. I’ve come with one block of jelly twice, less than 5 blocks a handful of times. I don’t know what it will take for me to give up. Actually, that’s a lie, I know exactly what it will take: a series of circumstances that prevents me from playing the game for a week or so. Then I’ll forget. Then I’ll remember what life is like without obsessing over continued failure. Until April that is, and the Mets start playing again.

*The girls are sleeping and Abby is nestled in the comforter. I want to take a picture, but I am afraid of a tired, grouchy Lynnette’s wrath so you’ll just have to imagine it. Madison’s a contortionist when she sleeps. When I get up to go to work in the morning, there’s no telling what kind of angles I’ll find her in. Two days ago, she was sleeping on her chest with both arms lifted above her head with her face turned to the left. She was diving into second or rebounding. I flipped her onto her back and pulled her arms down. Waking up with needles is the worst.

Taking it all the way back to 2003.

*Like nearly everyone else, I will likely be very busy tomorrow. I’ll help Lynnette cook, help myself to an uncouth amount of food, then hope my body doesn’t reject it while waiting in a line for something I don’t really need. Somewhere in there are the Cowboys and Tony Romo. In any event, there’s a pretty decent chance I won’t be able to find time to write tomorrow, so I might as well do this now.

I am an introvert. Everything I do that seems like the behavior of an extrovert is conscious compensation. I am not traditionally or non-traditionally handsome. I am 33 and that number is sadly smaller than my waist size, but I’m lazy, so making jokes about it is easier than actually working out. I swear in casual conversation. I have done horrible things to my body that I have no doubt will come to roost at a later date. I am forgetful, but only of important things. I am calculating. I have trained myself to be able to sink into paranoia instantly because I firmly believe that my mind is at its best in that state. I like poetry and fiction and writing but not so much reading, and if you ask me what I want to be when I grow up, you’ll get the same answer I gave 15 years ago – Beats the shit out of me. 

All of which is to say that I am an extremely flawed human being. I won’t condescend to call myself an adult. It seems like a lifetime ago, but once upon a time, I fell in love with a young woman I couldn’t have. Again. It’s what I did. Some guys like blondes. I liked women who were completely unavailable to me. I was all of those things listed in the previous paragraph and worse because I was a decade younger. Whenever I ask Lynnette why she decided to take a huge risk on me all those years ago, she can’t articulate her thoughts. Perhaps she has forgotten. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Perhaps she is consequently ashamed. Or she could just be ashamed, no one would blame her. Either way, it doesn’t matter to me.

I’m going to eat a ton of food tomorrow and I will be surrounded by my family. I will be thankful for many things, but most of all, I will be thankful for the woman who saw something in me all those years ago, even if I could not see it myself. When I told Lynnette how I felt about her and she replied that she had similar feelings, my first reaction was one of elation, but my second was one of incredulousness – Seriously?  Sometimes, I like to think Lynnette once walked through a yellow wood until her path diverged into two distinct roads. I assume that since she was/is a wise woman, she looked down both paths as far she she could see. But since she had already mostly decided to take the one path, I have no idea what the hell happened next. I only know that she inexplicably ended up walking the other with me.

Thank you, love. I will use the balance of the time I don’t spend getting on your nerves by trying to prove you right.