This year, Labor Day falls on September 7, which happens to be my wedding anniversary. On September 7, 1992, Kate and I were married in Hinsdale, Illinois.
This year, we celebrate 34 years of marriage.
Anniversaries invite grand gestures. For our 30th, I gave Kate a book containing 100 love poems that I had secretly written for her. The book had a print run of one and an audience of one. Writing it took months, but I enjoyed the process and the conspiratorial planning. Working on this poetic gift for her was a labor of love.
The benefits of being married to a poet are lyrical rather than financial. Kate receives a new poem on her birthday, our anniversary, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day, so poetry season begins for me every September and continues through the winter.
Still, the longer I am married, the more I recognize that a marriage is sustained by varied forms of devotion, not just love poems. They arrive as breakfasts, grocery lists, cups of tea, paid bills, completed errands, solo movies, long walks, and remembered preferences. Such gifts are easy to overlook precisely because they happen so often.
Labor Day honors work that is visible enough to be named. Marriage depends just as much on the work that goes unnamed: the errands completed, the preferences remembered, the sleep protected, the burdens quietly lifted.
This is the invisible work that makes a marriage visible, sustainable, and continually rewarding.
Every morning, I make a five-egg omelet. Three of those eggs go to our son Jukie, who needs the extra cholesterol as a treatment for Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome. The omelet also contains two to four times as much spinach as a reasonable person would consider appropriate because I love cooked spinach.
My alarm goes off at 6:35. During the summer, I often wake before then. On those mornings, I try to slip out of the bedroom, head downstairs, and begin writing poems, preparing lesson plans, or composing pub quiz questions. When 6:35 arrives, the alarm sounds somewhere beyond Kate’s hearing, and she sleep a little longer.
Kate performs plenty of invisible work of her own. She does most of our grocery shopping, often more than once a week. She knows when we are running low on spinach, frozen blueberries, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, and creatine. She anticipates what our daughter Geneva might need as well. She keeps track of bills and brings formidable skill to the medical and governmental bureaucracies of modern family life.
As the household’s chief anticipator, Kate sees the entire field. She anticipates tasks, appointments, and deadlines. Sometimes the person who performs this sort of work receives little recognition because a well-run household makes the work disappear. Everything simply seems to happen when it should.
My own expertise includes making Kate’s tea. I need to know if any particular Wednesday is a sugar day or a Splenda day, how much whole milk to add, and how hot the tea should be. Even the position of the tea bag’s string in relation to the drinking side of the cup receives consideration. Rituals like the preparation of the tea transform repetition into a language of love.
Walks have become part of our shared language, too. When our schedules align, Kate and I walk together through the greenbelts of South Davis. I love it when one of my greenbelt friends encounters Kate and me together – sometimes they look around for Jukie, my afternoon walking partner. When possible, Kate and I walk downtown to Crepeville for brunch and then return in time for Jukie’s van. We get four or five miles of exercise, a fine meal, and a stretch of uninterrupted conversation before the afternoon begins.
A marriage is filled with activities that sound unremarkable when reduced to a list. We made tea. We went for a walk. We bought groceries. We cooked breakfast. We played The Ronettes while washing up. Their significance lies in the room they make for each other in the shape of our days.
This attention becomes especially important because the people within a marriage keep changing. Kate and I are different from the people who stood together in Katherine Legge Memorial Park in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1992. A long marriage asks each spouse to keep learning the other.
Love depends upon attention because attention allows affection to remain current.
Sometimes attention means deciding whether your spouse needs you to hear, hug, or help. Sometimes it means interpreting a tired remark with generosity.
Sometimes it means exercising restraint and recognizing that an unwelcome comment could remain an unspoken thought.
The most revealing labors of love are often the ones that cease to feel laborious.
Kate will occasionally come downstairs as we prepare to leave the house and realize that she has forgotten something upstairs. She will ask me to retrieve it. I am glad to do so. My shoes are eager for steps, and my legs are eager for stairs. A request that once could have produced exasperation becomes another opportunity to be useful to someone I love while working towards my daily goal of 17,000 steps.
Through repetition, service becomes instinctive. Over time, a husband learns which cup to use, which groceries to replenish, which burdens he is best equipped to carry, and which small kindness will improve his wife’s morning.
Thirty-four years after our wedding, I still write poems for Kate. I still believe in declarations, surprises, celebrations, and gifts for an audience of one.
But Labor Day also seems an appropriate anniversary for us because marriage depends on work that rarely appears in public: the five-egg omelet, the carefully prepared tea, the quiet exit before the alarm, the long walk, the remembered grocery, the trip upstairs for forgotten lip balm or a pair of socks.
Over time, these small acts become so familiar that they can seem to disappear. Yet they are how love becomes visible: not once, in a grand gesture, but daily, in the shape of a shared life.
How nice that the temperatures are dropping for our outdoor pub quiz. Please plan to partake in the festivities on this pleasant evening at Sudwerk in Davis, the happening spot on 2nd Street. Bring your team to the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone on this September evening. The rest of you can sit inside where players will still be having fun. As Albert Schweitzer said, “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is a mere 829 words long!
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on adjectives, admissions, anatomies, anatomies, arrays, athletes, beginnings, benchmarks, bogs, borders, brewers, calculations, carbohydrates, carnivals, championships, changes, choruses, continents, contraltos, convoys, decorations, detoxifiers, digits, divas, dynasties, felonies, Francophones, genres, giants, gunslingers, harmonies, heritages, histories, improvisations, laureates, markets, Martians, measurements, mollusks, monarchs, principalities, producers, projections, Puritans, rankings, revolutionaries, riddles, rivers, robots, seabirds, shorelines, sitcoms, skeletons, soundtracks, tentacles, thoroughfares, transformations, vehicles, verses, volumes, waitresses, westerns, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
Best,
Dr. Andy
- Books and Authors. The travel cycle of Sinbad the Sailor was added to the collection of the One Thousand and One Nights. How many voyages did Sinbad the Sailor make?
- Film. What 2016 animated film has a mountain gorilla named Johnny say, “Look Dad, I….I’m sorry. But I just don’t want to be in your gang. I wanna be a singer”?
- Youth Culture. What are the six letters in the internet slang term that means “delusional”?
P.P.S. Join us September 3 at Poetry Night for Terry Moore and Natascha Lanes.