Synchronicity In Marriage - Fidelity, Love, Respect, Sharing Until The Clocks Are Set Back

Brent Fielding hated changing the clocks every Spring and Fall.  The new thermostat required a password and two-step security, the stove he had bought for the kitchen remodeling required almost as much, and the wall clock which never kept good time in the first place, required a step ladder to reach.  Resetting the clock on his new car was cloaked in mystery, hidden in a maze, and the missing piece of a thousand-piece puzzle. 

 

Yet it was at these two times of year that he reassessed his marriage - the resetting, the strange changes in light and shadow, the disassociated feeling, all were signifiers, indicators.  

Brent and his wife Barbery had been married for forty years. Their marriage had survived infidelities, family disputes, and the usual gamut of slights, willfulness, and indifference. They loved each other or at least knew that they would be adrift if one of them died. They had settled into a comfortable routine like most older married couples, but their relationship was a very active one within it.  They never tired of each other, and when one of them had gone out to a class or a meeting, the other felt an emptiness in the house.

As Brent grew older, more and more he began to notice patterns and outlines where before he saw substance.  He noticed how perfectly he and his wife could anticipate their movements so that they never got in each other’s way.  

Not in the small kitchen, nor in the narrow hallway, nor in and out the doors.  He could trace their flows and if he had drawn them, there would have been no straight lines; and if he could have animated them, they would have more resembled a choreographed pas de deux than polite leeway.  

He knew from his wife’s first footfall that she was descending the stairs so he waited until she came down before he went up to his office. He understood her morning routine of coffee, yoghurt, New York Times so well, that never once did it ever interfere with his tea, texts, or chopping the  celery for soup.  They moved through the kitchen with practiced movements, but not not without grace.

The substance of things seemed to matter less than their outlines and their forms.  He noticed how pictures were framed, how the rooms of the house were arranged and built.  He noticed angles and shadows, the lines of phone and light cords, the silhouettes of trees and the shape of phones and sinks.

Brent found that once he started to be aware of his obsession with shape, form, and outline, he could not stop himself from seeing only the thumb hole in the scissors, the composition of the Giotto fresco, the repeating circles of clock, trivet, and ashtray; the disappearing lines of phone cords; the delineation of dried berry stems.  His office was no longer one of color, memories, and texture; but only outlines.

At the same time he came to appreciate his life with his wife more than he ever had. This focus on intersecting patterns or balletic approach gave it new meaning.  If he could emotionally prosper in a routine without substance but only outline, then the relationship was indeed an important one without which he could not survive.

Marriage had always been a matter of synchronicity, a balletic dance, an intimacy born of appreciation of the subtlety of paired movement that only matures after many years of dancing.  Now that elision had become routine - there were no new patterns, unusual pirouettes or steps, and if there had been, he would have been concerned.  

In his younger years such disruptions in synchronicity might have meant a lover, a tryst, a new emotional algorithm which he did not understand.  Now interruptions in the perfect choreography might mean the onset of dementia, or a final release of age-old, well-hidden frustrations. 

Now it wasn't so much changing patterns, but adjustments to time, and the resetting of the clocks which heralded them.  Neither one had talked about the disappearance of patterns, the eventual solitary life that one of them would have to lead, a life without Swan Lake, and worse, a life leading to the end of time itself. 

'We all die alone', Tolstoy wrote in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and like Ivan few of us are prepared for the solitude, the fear, the uncertainty, and the final disassociation with everything around us.  No grieving relatives, no solemn prayers of priest or rabbi, no familiar music can allay this terror of the end, the unexperienced future. 

Time is relative said Einstein in his famous disquisitions on matter and energy; but even outside the world of physics we know this.  Old people feel time is rushing by, suddenly it's Sunday again, didn't I just water the plants...While young people feel time moving painfully slowly - dragging hours of anticipation, excitement.  

Which was why the resetting of the clocks made Brent anxious.  He was manipulating time - didn't we get an extra hour of life every Fall?

Of course not, and even if we did, wouldn't that upset God's plan? 

Einstein said that if a spaceship travelled at close to the speed of light time would slow, and that compared to those left behind on earth, passengers would remain young.  Returning to base they would find everyone they knew dead, gone, and buried.  Slowing time meant accelerating it, neither one a good idea. 

A few years ago there was a partial solar eclipse in Washington, and Brent went down to the Georgetown waterfront where there was a clear, unobstructed view of the sky over the Potomac.  When the eclipse was at its zenith - again the sun was only partially obscured - the ambient light changed, the birds stopped singing, the picnickers on the park lawn spoke more quietly, more softly.  The world was at a strange, unaccustomed moment.  Life was always a matter of sunup, sundown at regular, predictable times and this threw that all off.  It was unsettling. 

The eclipse stayed with him for days, and he remembered it especially at the resetting of the clocks.  Both were small, unusual interruptions in familiar patterns and as such could not be ignored. 

At both events, his life of physical patterns - the pas de deux, the intersecting lines, the shadows that we make that come and go - and his timely routine were upset.  He could only think of place without both.  No patterns, no time. 

'I love you', he said to his wife, very unusual for him a very undemonstrative person, but fitting somehow at this particular moment. 

So far, so good. Mens sana in corpore sano but for how much longer?  Suddenly that didn't matter now that he had put fractals, shadows, lines and clocks away.