Crazy Together - A Matched Set

I know that many of you read and enjoy, as I do, the blog CRAZY AUNT PURL. Who could NOT love Laurie and her zany sense of humor? The thing I love best about her is that she's a loveably flawed human being, like all of us, who isn't afraid to share her most vulnerable quirks to the world. Amazingly enough, what she says often reasonates so deeply with her readers. You're laughing insanely one minute, spitting your coffee on the screen, and the next minute, your heart is touched so profoundly and you ache for her. She's a lovely mix of beauty, smarts, vulnerability and Southern-grown and LA planted craziness - and she writes so compellingly that whether you're laughing or crying for her, you're WITH her all the way. She's amassed a large group of really witty and smart commenters too. So whenever I read Purl I have to read all the comments too, because they're a blast.

Now she's recently hit the "two year anniversary" of her ex-jerk-husband up and leaving her because of an insane need to "find himself" and be a superficial mystery man who nevertheless "found himself" immediately with another woman. Her heart was broken, but over the past two years, we've seen her grow and survive the heartache.

Well the other day, I think it was her October 26th entry perhaps? She's talked about a new man in her life who she's keeping pretty much on the "down low" because it's a newly developing relationship and she doesn't want to advertise it too much just yet. But she mentioned that she had him over for dinner the other night, and he picked a newspaper lying on her table and she had a disturbing flashback to her ex doing the same thing - except it was DIFFERENT because this man was really WITH her and not using the paper to ignore her and go within himself etc. Sorry, I'm sitting here rehashing the whole column, when you can/should just go there yourself and read both the essay and the comments - all 76 of them or whatever!!! It's amazing the insight Laurie has about this event, as well as the different perspectives that folks bring to it. The way they interpret it.

The readers tend to generally agree that we're all crazy in some way, both women and men, but we're not crazy in the same way. We all have "baggage" to bring from our past relationships into our current one. One commenter pointed out that in a relationship that works, you can both have baggage, but it should ideally be a matching set!!!

All this rehashing is leading me to a brief reflection on my own special relationship with my husband. He's truly a gem - a rare find and definitely a "keeper." Yes, he's crazy and I'm CERTAINLY crazy. We have habits and quirks that annoy the hell out of one another, but we've been successfully together for 21 years and I still love him all the more deeply today than I did when we were stumbling through our own relationship, trying to figure out if we could survive one another's newly-discovered craziness and baggage. I knew I liked him immediately and we just had chemistry - and I found his faults loveable as well as annoying. Through a lot of shared life experiences, including parenthood, growing through our problems and pain, we've come to share a relationship that is deeper than any other I've shared with anyone. Nothing else even comes CLOSE to the zany bond I feel with him. I think a shared life view and most of all SENSE OF HUMOR has held us together through everything.

Here's a brief story - our lovely daughter was in a big chorale event at school and she had a lovely black evening gown that the girls each wore and the dress required matching black dressy shoes which in my working-woman haste, I had totally forgotten to buy. We'd been shopping several times on weekends, but never found exactly the right shoes, and somehow down to the wire, I totally kept putting daughter off and not buying them. Well, this week, on Tuesday - it was performance night. I totally forgot again and had my cell phone abandoned in my car all day because work has been crazy. Well, the girl (who doesn't drive) frantically called her Father at work and said, "Daddy, I HAVE to have a pair of black shoes before 5 p.m. tonight. Can you buy me some black dress shoes in size 7?"

Being the wonderful man he is, he spent his lunch break frantically going to a shoe store and picking out what he thought would "look nice" for her. He got the size right. 7. The shoes fit just fine. But they were . . . . very ugly black clodhopper loafers that looked like something even my 93-year-old grandmother wouldn't wear!!! He said, "Honey, are they okay?" She didn't want to hurt his feelings so she quietly went into my closet and dug around until she found my one and ONLY pair of black party/dress shoes in a size 6 1/2. She squeezed into them and made do. When husband noticed that she didn't have on HIS shoes he'd selected, he asked her why and said, "Ah, Dad, I love you, but you bought a pair of Pilgram shoes. I can't wear those!"

My husband told me this story right before the concert started. I know it probably won't sound that funny to most people, but one of Bob's loveable quirks is his total lack of fashion sense - for men or women!!! He's the type of guy who is a total nerd and wears white socks with black pants. So knowing that he tried so hard, and his own ability to laugh at himself had us giggling all night. We'd just look at each other and whisper, "Pilgram shoes!" and we'd start laughing all over again.

I'm really glad my husband and I are a matched set. I love the luggage - especially the scuff marks. And the Pilgram shoes!