Better Be Home Soon

Dear Companion, I enjoyed my jaunt yesterday, driving along a misty wet Route 23, up hills and down dales, through Hillsdale and after the light into the mountains to Great Barrington. It felt good to have KZE on and fly. The movie was good. Love Polanski, the way his mind works - intrigue, intellectual puzzle, existential concerns, sinister shadings, wit (e.g., in the form of a got-up hotel clerk, whose identity revealed in the credits caused me to smile) - all very satisfying. But it was very dystopic, ultimately, too - a disturbing absence of countervailing angels, guardian or otherwise.

Only a handful of people in the audience, unsurprisingly for a weekday afternoon, among them three women in their 60s, maybe 70s. They tittered like schoolgirls throughout, counter to the tone & content of what was transpiring onscreen. Friends will chat and quietly joke at a movie of course - it's understandable - but I finally lost patience with them when the women gasped as if goosed when Ewan McGregor dropped his robe & stood for the briefest moment in his discreet altogether. What are you all - twelve? I blurted out over my shoulder. My God! I know I shouldn't have done that. But they were ridiculous.

I overheard their chat before the movie started. One of them was going on about an impending visit to friends for the occasion of the Renewal of Their Marriage Vows. My instant thought was - Can Divorce Be Far Behind? I'm cynical. Sure enough the woman then darkly hinted at Trouble in the marriage, probably (her coded tone of voice effectively conveying gossip) in the form of an Affair or Affairs, Worked Through, and followed by the Ritual Vow Renewal. (Even the woman didn't sound too convinced. Her companions clucked about How Hard It Is On Relationships These Days, tsk, tsk.)

Marriage vow renewal. It just sounds so forced and contrived to me. No wonder everyone's so miserable. I mean, if a marriage works - it works. And people grow, or don't grow but change in other ways; and they can grow apart. I don't know. I'm obviously in a big flux myself these days...

You know, sometimes I think about Governor Sanford of whichever Carolina, and his soulmate in Buenos Aires. And you know, I wish he weren't governor, just be a partner in a law firm already so you're not fodder for national media, etc. - but the romantic in me is sympathetic towards him. And I find his wife, the Wronged One, a completely offputting harridan. A nightmare. The very sort whose overdeveloped sense of entitlement and propriety is so divorced from any empathic sense of the sensual instincts and emotional needs of others (in particular, her husband) that she's the type (of whom this puritanical culture's chock full) who'll attend an R-rated movie and then titter and cluck over the shocking vision of a buff naked McGregor - and then wonder why her husband looks for good, warm, honest loving elsewhere.

This post is a mess, but I don't feel like editing much this morning. Let me get going on other things. I hope all is well with you, my dearest. I love you. Putting my arms around you. Have a great day.