Driven

I don’t love it that our sailboat is a five-hour drive from home. It’s hard to get away to go there, hard to tackle the work and projects that we have in mind, hard to get the boat-time I’d wish for, if I really had my way. But yesterday did remind me of one of the GIFTS of driving-time with My Person: When a conversation lasts for five hours, its scope is boundless.

I don’t mean to imply that Jon and I don’t talk, at home. We share a job, for starters, so it’s our norm, at day’s end, to “debrief” on our respective perspectives of what went down in the day—our workers, our residents, our guests, our boss, our property, our projects, our dramas, our ongoing inside jokes. Or we talk about our garden. Our cats. Our mothers. Our meals. Our calendar. Our sailboat plans. Our prayers. We invent the cats’ parts in household conversations. We talk about what he’s been fixing. We talk about what I’ve been writing.

We tend to go on to other things, though, in the natural course of a day—whether that’s clearing the dinner dishes or answering the phone or turning on the show we’ve been watching, or just falling asleep. The “conversation units” aren’t measured in hours.

When we drive—without those accidental and incidental boundaries on our time—the uninterrupted conversation ranges farther afield.

I have yet to take a car-trip with Jon in which I didn’t hear a story that was new to me. Yesterday there was a story about a casino escapade, one about playing on his motorbike in the snow, and one in the setting of an Army tank, in the leading edge of Operation Desert Shield as it became Desert Storm. Sometimes I find myself almost in Interview Mode, drawing out a string of new stories like a magician pulling the rope of knotted handkerchiefs from his sleeve.

We’re in our tenth year of marriage, but when Jon & I started courting, I had four decades of Living behind me, and he had five. We’re not likely to run out of stories any time soon, so we keep weaving our separate pasts into our shared present. Our shared future.

Soon after our first date (where we talked and talked and talked—and then kissed!) Jon bought us each a Bluetooth earpiece, because we were spending so much time on the phone. Every day, we were learning each other. He’d be upside-down under the dash of the car he was working on, and I’d be washing my breakfast dishes or something, while we talked and talked. Wandering conversationally far afield, with “conversation units” measured in hours.

He wove himself into my life, and after eight weeks he put a ring on me. Six weeks after that, I put on a pretty dress and married him. (That sounds so hasty, put like that—but I had exactly ZERO doubts. And here we are talking about a 10th-anniversary trip somewhere…)

Midway through yesterday’s drive, when we stopped at Starbucks to pee and caffeinate, we found ourselves waiting for our frappuccinos with straws in hand. I made my straw into a sword and made him a knight. He made his straw into a wand and made me a goat. I obligingly responded with “Meh-eh-eh-eh!” and our grins lit our faces.

I turn fifty-one today, and Jon will be sixty-two on Saturday… but all signs seem to point to the pair of us growing OLD before we grow UP. Just so long as we get to do the growing together, I will happily keep driving.