On 10 May Funny Guy and I had our first date…and we’re still together.
It’s looking good.
We just had four good nights together: Thursday and Sunday nights I worked (at home, writing in my office) and Funny Guy read; Friday we had people for dinner (cousins, their little boy, and my mother); and Saturday we saw a brilliant, amazing, visionary film, You, the Living. It’s playing through Tuesday at Film Forum on Houston Street, so go see it if you can.
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In short, we’re leading an ordinary life together.
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Well, I don’t know if two eccentrics like us can be called “ordinary.” Funny Guy was a student radical in the 60s, a political organizer who was jailed and beaten by the police. He’s still provocative, but not threatening enough to interest the authorities. His FBI file is probably gathering dust.
Okay, for someone in that generation (he’s 65), having an FBI file may not qualify as eccentric. But he’s eccentric in other ways, some of them visible (the little blue feather in his Czech baseball-type hat, the Groucho-Marxist way he moves his eyebrows) and some of them not. Let’s put it this way: if his many friends knew he was called Funny Guy, they’d agree at once that it was the perfect name for him.
(This morning he told me something really quirky, and I said, I’m going to put that in the blog! and he thought it, whatever it was, belonged here. But now I can’t remember what it was. So I’ll just add something else about him: when Funny Guy’s daughter was about 2, she went to a day care center at the business where he worked. He used to visit at nap time, lie down on the mat with her, and go to sleep. Once he slept through a meeting….peacefully snoozing on the mat in a room of two-year-olds. That is so Funny Guy.)
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And as for me — well, read the whole blog and decide for yourself how to characterize me.
Alas I don’t (to my knowledge) have an FBI file. I ought to be ashamed.
But then, maybe I do!?
I have no idea, but I doubt it.
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At any rate, we’re devoted; we never argue; we seem to think the same way on most things, trivial and significant; we’re social beings and love meeting one another’s friends; and — in short — we’re ceasing to be of literary interest.
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Actually I’m sort of superstitious about saying that, but I said it anyway.
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Okay, of literary interest:
– Funny Guy does the dishes and cleans up very nicely.
– My mother is getting used to him and vice versa.
– Plan C (who appears to be at the beginning of what with luck may prove to be his final romance) is curious about Funny Guy, and Funny Guy seems to be developing an interest in Plan C. Funny Guy hasn’t forgotten anything I’ve told him about Plan C and sometimes says things like “Plan C would love that” or “I can see Plan doing that!”
Hmmmmm!
– Funny Guy has by now met so many of my cousins that he asked me to make a family tree so he can keep them straight.
– I now have a pretty clear sense of the chronology of Funny Guy’s love life (2 wives, 2 girlfriends, over the past 40+ years), so I can say things like, “Oh yes, that was in the Cynthia period, wasn’t it? 1995 through 2002?” and so forth.
– Every Monday when Funny Guy goes back to his apartment, he leaves something here (by accident), usually his cell phone, sometimes a few items of clothing. You know what Freud says about that (if you leave something somewhere, it means you want to return there).
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Each us remembers with enormous love and emotion a doting grandmother who was the most important figure in our childhoods.
Thinking about those grandmothers last night, as I walked upstairs to get back to work after a chat-break with Funny Guy, I imagined our two grandmothers in heaven, talking to one another, both pleased that the grandchild had at last met someone to love and be loved by.
I moved myself to a few tears, at the same time reminding myself that I’m an atheist, a sceptic, and an ironist, and the notion of anyone with any kind of consciousness whatever after death is as preposterous to me as, say, the idea of a talking lemon merinque pie or a flying ink cartridge or an invisible garbage truck.
So I mention my little vision not to convey a newfound religious belief, god help us, but just to show the emotion with which I think of Funny Guy.
As a survivor, just barely, of Catholic elementary school, Funny Guy is every bit as atheistic and sceptical as I am. So I think he’d feel the same way about my little vision.
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Oh yes, I forgot to say: another way we’re alike is that we’re both worriers, especially worried about safety. So I worry that now that I’ve met the perfect man, something will happen to him. And he worries about my safety. — But fortunately I’m busy and don’t have time to be consumed with anxiety. But if I weren’t, I would be.
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So here we are, three months into something quite amazing.
A very nice anniversary that we aren’t celebrating in any particular way; just taking note of it.
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