Charlotte County Florida Weekly

Slow turnin’




 

 

I’ve always believed in divorce, a fact I feel compelled to mention here as I reach my 20th wedding anniversary this week.

Twenty years married on the last day of March, and I didn’t start — this time — until I was 47. It was a breezy afternoon on a dock stretched into a bay behind an art gallery in a town called Matlacha, the low little place cleared for two occasions: marriage and foolish optimism.

You can’t have one without the other.

A preacher who’d mail-ordered his license from California for a dollar consecrated the moment, using the finest words ever written for such an occasion. The two of us had plucked those words from thin air and thick experience the week before. No, I don’t seem to have them here at my fingertips.

Since he was an opera singer in another life, everybody could hear what the preacher said, whether or not they could hear what we said or what my sister-in-law, Gwen, recited from Dr. Seuss: “Oh, the places you’ll go.”

They could also hear the late Scottish bagpiper Scotty Wishert, probably all the way across the peninsula from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Mr. Wishert joined us for the princely sum of a single bottle of fine Scotch whiskey and a couple of stiff shots, before filling his moaning tartan bag then rending the sky with the piped fire of battles, dirges and unrepentant joy. That was before the celebrants indulged in a fortifying gumbo, along with libations of one of the nation’s two most potent legal drugs (alcohol), and a wedding cake made with 60 eggs collected from our numerous yard chickens.

To get those eggs, Amy and I had been living together in sin for the better part of a year, the purgatory prescribed by Gwen and my mother-in-law, Cynthia, as an exercise my darling wife required before marriage. She hadn’t shown good judgment with past choices, in their opinions (and hers), and thus the wait-and-see advice.

Although her sister had no better luck with men than Amy at one time or another, and her mother came from a different experience and time, they’d long since learned the art of hypocrisy (do as I say, not as I do), sometimes a useful tool.

When I’d asked for her hand about a week after I first met her, she said (not yes), “Not yet,” because she loves and trusts them.

We’d been corresponding daily in letters for months by that time, though we’d never seen each other until she appeared before me in the flesh one day. Dressed in jeans and a man’s shirt that first time, she was also draped in necklaces, adorned with earrings and bracelets, striding toward the future in her signature cowboy boots and tossing gold-streaked auburn hair around her head like a halo of wheat in the wind.

I was startled to learn she’d been on the road listening to an old John Hiatt album, “Slow Turning.” Coincidentally, so had I.

Don’t jump right in, her family had warned her.

So we jumped right into sin. I’d been doing it for 47 years anyway, sinning up one side of the road and down the other. What’s another year, I figured? And the day finally came when I could, and did, marry my way out of sin — almost 20 years after my first marriage ended in divorce.

If the United States is remembered much at all in four or five centuries for contributions to humanity, I hope people say, “Yeah, the U.S. Didn’t they put a man on the moon the first time? Who cares? The thing they gave to humanity was divorce, American style.”

Anybody can get one, and a lot of people at fault in a divorce can, perversely it seems, get a no-fault divorce. That’s how we roll.

Contrary to the widespread assumption in the American Book of Right Thinking that divorce is bad, nothing could be further from the truth. There is often no good reason and many bad reasons to express a commiserating sorrow when people announce they’re getting a divorce.

“I’m so sorry” should be replaced in many instances with, “That’s wonderful, congratulations!”

Divorce, I’m certain, has saved more lives, or at least given individuals more opportunities to recover from bad choices and make something of their lives, than any other social practice I know.

That’s not to say it isn’t a toxic infusion of heartbreak and humiliation, both for those who seek a divorce and those who resist it.

In fact it’s a death of sorts. Divorced people inevitably find themselves harnessed to a backpack of grief and loss, whether or not they’re also relieved.

But for many suited to the steady work of true-love marriage — work that demands not perfection but tolerance, respect, warm caring and the habitual effort that attends a good marriage every day — divorce can be a great ally.

In my case, it ejected me suddenly and without ceremony from the cockpit of a broken dream, leaving me to make what I could of luck and knowing.

For more than a half-million Floridians and 28 million Americans now divorced, I wish them both the same opportunity and the outcome I’ve inherited, with its myriad domestic pleasures and unexpected joys.

Marriage is both harness and paradox, which isn’t for everybody.

But for me in such a harness, freedom — the freedom to love, the freedom to understand — becomes paradoxically possible.

“It’s been a slow turnin’/From the inside out/A slow turnin’/ But you come about,” John Hiatt sang, banging on that old guitar.

“Slow learnin’/ But you learn to sway/A slow turnin’ baby/ Not fade away.” ¦

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