Eleven Years

JRL and I have been married eleven years today, and shouldn't we be out eating a fancy meal somewhere? Yes, we should. Instead we spent the day getting ready to move (sorting kid clothes, buying furniture, kicking junk out of the way). Oh well -- what's the traditional material for the eleventh year, anyway? A microfiber dust cloth, I think.

I've been trying to think of really good novels about marriage, but the only one that keeps coming to mind is Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Rough Strife, which was firmly out of print when I read it years ago (garage sale find (garage sales were so much better before eBay)). It's about the marriage of two egotistical people and how they battle, and I remember being impressed with how smart it is. You don't often see a really thoughtful or brainy take on marriage. Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road is one long marital squabble, and of course there are lots of books in which people are married, but fewer books that focus specifically on the nature of that relationship. The longer I stay married the more mysterious it seems.

Hey, I just noticed I'm wearing the same shorts I wore the morning before we got married. Could it all just come down to... lucky shorts?