A few days ago, one of my friends asked, "When you met your spouse, did you immediately know that he was the one? Did you immediately envision growing old with him?"
I said, "It was 1983 when we first met. I thought we'd be dead in a nuclear war soon. But I did think he'd be a good partner in surviving the immediate aftermath before the radiation slowly killed us."
She laughed, but indeed I was serious. I think of myself as the last of the Cold War babies, the ones always scanning the sky for a mushroom cloud. My elementary schools had both tornado drills and nuclear drills, which were the same: take a book, crouch against the wall in an inside hallway, put the book over the back of the head and spine, and hope that it's all adequate protection against a failing foreign policy/the result of warm air meeting cold.
In 1983, when I first met my spouse at our small, southern, liberal arts college, I chose a major based on what I liked, not on what I thought would take me into the future. People asked, "What are you going to do with a major in English?" I said, "We're all going to be dead in a nuclear war. What does it matter?" I read various survival scenarios. I kept my 74 Monte Carlo longer than I should have because it had an ignition that would survive an electromagnetic pulse.
Even though I was expecting a nuclear war, I still got married on this day in 1988. People gathered, we made our pledges in the same church where my parents made similar pledges, and off we drove for a short honeymoon in Asheville, NC, before we had to be back for grad school orientation.
This week, we've begun transitioning to the next phase of our married life, as we have moved to the condo that we're renting. I don't know if this is true for everyone, but moving brings out the best and worse in our relationship. My thoughts have returned to those post-apocalyptic scenarios. My spouse would be very good at making a shelter out of the ruins. Why is moving so hard? I would be very good at gathering and reassembling the scraps of society into something useful. Why is it so hard for me to take a household and move it a mile away and figure out which item goes on which shelf?
One of the benefits of having been together for decades is that I know our patterns, and on my good days, I'm patient. On my best days, I know how to get us to a better spot, out of our frustrations and anger towards the ideas that we had of how we were headed to a better spot.
We still have so much work to do, but we are further along than we were this time last week. I no longer expect that we will soon be dead in a nuclear war, but I do realize that we're at a slightly higher risk of that scenario in our post-Cold War time. During my childhood, the U.S. knew who had which nukes. Now we don't.
A global pandemic that has produced a highly contagious variant is not the pandemic I planned for, but here we are. And now we are doing the kind of planning for the future that some people do in their younger years: looking at our finances, looking at our expenses, making some judicious moves that will net us the best return on our investment.
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