I Married a Real, Live Saint

[I have a lot to say today...]


Last night, we reclined in the living room on the chocolate brown couch, each with a book in hand. Me - A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, of course. Johnny - The Creeds of Christendom, Volume 1 by Philip Schaff. I have one pet peeve when we read together. Though Johnny reads brilliant texts that I nearly always agree upon, he finds them so profound that he says every five minutes, "Hey, can I read you something incredible?" I try to muster up patience from my selfish soul and say, "Sure." See, I'm an avid reader, but a slow one. I savor every word, every sentence, and usually read each paragraph twice. I need to focus.

In fact, when I started reading The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, that fictional married couple reminded me of us (on page 48): "Lou realized years ago that the sight of her reading impelled Maytree to try to drag her into his reading. She always went back to her reading without a word."

Here are mine and Johnny's favorite sentences read aloud from our books last night:

Johnny/Philip Schaff - "For this reason a creed ought to use language different from that of the Bible. A string of Scripture passages would be no creed at all, as little as it would be a prayer or a hymn. A creed is, as it were, a doctrinal poem written under the inspiration of divine truth (a footnote, page 7)."

Me/Rebecca Solnit - "To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In [Walter] Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery (page 6). ... And there's another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn't cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost (page 10)."

After reading books, Johnny rubbed my parched feet with one hand and flipped through a Rembrandt book with the other hand. I checked e-mail. Then I picked up Solnit's book again, and Johnny took over my MacBook for one of his favorite hobbies - goofy pictures using the Photo Booth program. This picture is one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time - Saint Johnny:



This one is a little scary - Picasso Johnny:



I then took over my laptop and Milo ended up in Johnny's lap for a tummy-rub. Here's a lo-fi snapshot via Photo Booth:



One second Milo is super-affectionate, and the next he is a maniac, biting Johnny's hand:



Our days and nights may not be thrilling, but boy, they sure are blessedly good.