About a Boy

It's amazing to me that I can spend a decade with the same man and still find out new things about him daily. No, I don't believe that one can ever fully know another person. My father, because he is so much like me, and I like him, seems to often know my thoughts. A marriage, however, is a whole other game. I think a bit of secrecy is maybe the key when one enters an institution with a better-than-half failure rate. I often imagine the fallout if I spoke daily about my changing fears and desires for my own domestic agreement.

The Bunny and I have the same ritual every night at bedtime: We collectively turn out the lights, re-check that the front door and gate are locked, set the alarm system, and corral the dogs. The person that is last to get upstairs must pick up our brickhouse pug, Sebastian, and carry his heavy ass up the narrow staircase. (Yes, our little dog is so pampered that he won't even climb the stairs when he is too sleepy to do it himself.) Because we both hate doing it so much, sometimes one of us will lie and say we are "going to get something to drink," but we'll just sneak upstairs instead. This forces the unsuspecting party, still half-sleeping on the couch downstairs, to lug the dog up to the bedroom.

Last night, I was the clever one who made it to the bedroom first. As I was washing my face, another nightly ritual, I heard the Bunny softly singing as he walked slowly up the stairs with Sebastian:

"You need to find a way to say precisely what you mean.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Even though the sound of it is simply quite atrocious
If you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious..."

It wasn't the kind of bombastic, showboat singing in which we each often indulge. Instead, this was a completely private moment, if even consciously so, between my husband and himself. I doubt I was hardly meant to hear it.

It struck me that even though we both share some childhood memories--The Goonies and a longing for Lunchables, which our mothers wouldn't buy--he has never once mentioned that he used to watch Mary Poppins when he was a boy. This from the man who got sent home in grade school for wearing an explicit Motley Crue t-shirt to class. This from the man who left the tell-tell scent of cigarettes and patchouli oil on me when I would sneak back into my parents' home after a night of making out. Midnight monster flicks and Poison albums I can understand, but when I heard the man I've loved for all these years singing this juvenile song, a product of a film he's never once mentioned in a all these years, my heart just pounded for him. I imagined the young Bunny sitting in a one-piece pajama suit in the floor in front of a wood-paneled television. His baby blue eyes were certainly shining, and there was likely a smear of chocolate somewhere on his mouth that nearly covered his lucky dimples.

The whole ordeal just did something to me, and I knew last night that I couldn't wait to pen it all for you, dear readers. It's kind of nice to be reminded, unexpectedly and in the middle of the night, how much one can love another.