Here I was, prepared to write my usual slice-of-life post.  I mean, what else can you do when the woman in front of you at the postal store tells the clerk, “No, my daughter moved upstairs after her boyfriend threatened to kill her.”

Eavesdropping.  For me, it’s a way of life.

But then, I noticed that my friend, Susan Johnston, at her excellent blog, The Urban Muse, had opted for a list of her top 10 posts in 2010.  What a great idea, I thought, deciding to do it.

Creative borrowing.  For me, it’s a way of life.

So, here are my top 10 posts for 2010:

1) Just for Today, I am Pat Robertson — Can’t help myself, I just love this one. Who knew how much fun it would be to be a zealot for a day?

2) Failing at Enlightenment Over and Over Again — Wondering why we have to learn the same hard lessons about the great value of life again and again.

3) How To Travel and Lose Your Mind — What’s worse than traveling with one man and one iPhone? Traveling with two men and two iPhones.

4) Unexpected Compliments in a Medical Setting — When you first fall in love, you never contemplate exchanging long glances from a hospital bed.

5) Just Stop Beating Me Up With Punctuation Marks — Ranting about exclamation mark and emoticon abuse.

6) The Day When Nothing Made Sense — The day my father died, I couldn’t do anything right — except opt for White Russians.

7) My Excuse is I Had a Fencing Accident — When life gives you a black eye, you need to come up with a glamorous reason for it.

8. I Just Lack a Flair for Drama, That’s All — I wouldn’t have chuted out of the JetBlue plane even if I could have. Sulking is far more expressive.

9) Shut Up, She Explained — Yes, yes, marriage is about compromise. But sometimes, it’s the other guy’s turn.

10) Not Everything Can Be Hurried — Maybe it’s unamerican to grieve too slowly. My dear, I don’t give a damn.

Happy new year to all!

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Alisa Bowman — who (full disclosure) is a friend of mine — has written a smart, timely, tough-minded book about saving her marriage called Project Happily Ever After: Saving Your Marriage When the Fairytale Falters.

Bowman, who also blogs at a site with the same name, bills her book as the “first marital improvement book written from the perspective of a recovering divorce daydreamer.”  In fact, she had also taken up frequently fantasizing about her husband’s imminent death, which she’s pretty sure she would survive quite handily after throwing him a really great funeral.

One night, at dinner with a friend, Bowman confesses her marriage is hopeless.  She and her husband argue, they no longer take pleasure in each other or have sex, they simmer with suspicion and hostility.  Instead of offering automatic throw-the-bum-out sympathy and the name of a good divorce lawyer, Bowman’s friend asks whether she has done everything possible to salvage her marriage.  “Promise me you will try everything,” she insisted.  “He probably just needs you to tell him what you want.  Men are clueless.  Never forget that.”

Bowman promises.  It’s fascinating to watch the transformation of this self-admitted driven, workaholic writer to a driven workaholic wife determined to move heaven and earth and the floorboards of her house to save her marriage.  Or maybe it’s not so much a transformation as a transfer of energy and focus.  Bowman immerses herself in marital self-help books, she begins to talk with her husband about their problems, she makes her marriage and keeping her family together the greatest priority of her life.

Since Alisa Bowman’s writing the book and controlling the narrative, it’s tempting to give her most of the credit for saving her union.  But one person can never save a marriage.  Her husband, however clueless and often clumsy, loves her and wants to stay married.  Together, they move forward and backward and sideways, both of them straining to appreciate and love each other better.  Think of a three-legged race — awkward till you learn to adjust yourself to the other person’s pace and direction, then awkward again when you forget what you’ve just learned.

Along the way, Bowman is funny and starkly honest and doesn’t spare herself from her own lacerating observations.  The book — and the marriage — are a bumpy ride.  Like any other marriage, theirs is a work still in progress.

Bowman’s book reminds me of why I’m always so bored by the long, glowing wedding stories in The New York Times and why I can’t get enough of the 10-, 15- or 25-years later stories that occasionally run in the same section to catch readers up with the lives of the pairs who pledged their troths in the newspaper pages.

The wedding is one kind of story: sumptuous, fleeting, expensive, frothy.  The marriage is something else entirely — messy, complicated, convoluted, rich, gritty.  Angels sing and hound dogs bark, hearts break and — ideally — are healed, intimacy is forged by sparks from that same early electricity and from tens of thousands of tiny moments that feature spilled liquids, incontinent animals and children, and knowing glances and belly laughs no one else in this world but the two of you will ever understand.

I’m glad Alisa Bowman had a friend who challenged her to exhaust every possibility before she divorced.  I’m glad her husband was willing to do his share.  And I’m glad she wrote this book.  A good marriage is worth it — but you both have to want it badly and you have to be lucky.  Project Happily Ever After gives you one couple’s story of two people who learned just that.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read one of my favorite, holiday-appropriate posts about marriage, another anniversary!

I’ve forgotten who said it to me or when it was, exactly. But I can still see the expression on her face — the puzzlement, the pain.  She and her husband had lost one parent, then another.  There were more diseases on the horizon, more bad news coming.  She was steeling herself for more.

“Is this how it’s going to be from now on?”

It was a question about her age and mine, this time of life, when the losses of friends and family members are mounting.  This year, I lost my father, an old friend from graduate school, my friend Pat.  Two other friends are seriously ill, too.

Last week, another friend, Gary Chapman, died suddenly on a kayaking trip in Guatemala.  He was 58, seemingly robust, but died from a massive heart attack.  His wife, Carol, my dear friend, is suddenly a widow.  She and her husband lived a passionate, adventurous life, full of travel and friends and long conversations.  Together, they were complete.

Now I look at her face, ravaged by grief.  I know she will survive this, because I know how strong she is and how many caring friends she has.  But it’s going to be hard and lonely.  She knows that, less than a week after his death.  She knows she will get through it, somehow, but right now, she is living from minute to minute.

So, yes.  This is how it’s going to be from now on.  This is the human condition, this is how it always was.  It’s this, but it’s more.  I think of our wonderful friend Bob Solomon, the philosopher, and his great capacity for love and friendship.  I’ve always loved and drawn comfort from his words, which were spoken at his funeral, “Gratitude, I want to suggest, is not only the best answer to the tragedies of life. It is the best approach to life itself.”

In this holiday season, I am grateful that Carol and Gary had so many full and good years together.  I’m grateful for birth of Collins Grace Alonzo, the first grandchild of my good friend, Steve Collins — who promises to be a doting grandfather.

I’m happy both our kids will be here for the holidays, that we’ll give the last holiday party in this house we’ve loved, that my husband and I still laugh and take great pleasure in each other.

This is how it’s going to be — forever and from now on.  We celebrate whenever we can, we dance, we drink, we sing off-key.  We seek as much light and life as we can get.  When it grows darker, we light another candle for as long as we can, trying to be grateful for every flicker of fire.  Because, really, how else do you live?

Merry Christmas to you all.

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)

You may recall I raised a few objections when Austin Vision Center, our neighborhood optical store,
repeatedly botched my order for bifocals.  The saga dragged on, letters were written, phone calls were exchanged, voices were raised.

“All I want is an apology,” I told Max or Dennis or whoever called me one day.  “Nobody’s even apologized to me.”

“I already said I was sorry when you answered the phone,” Max/Dennis said.  “I guess you didn’t hear me.”  (Oh, yeah, my bad.  It wasn’t like he was going to arouse himself to apologize a second time if I hadn’t heard him mutter the first.)

Anyway, since I was so unhappy, Max/Dennis said, the store wanted to offer me 10 percent off my bill.  I said OK to the 10 percent, but told him they could forget about taking my glasses back for transition lenses.  I was tired of waiting, I was tired of incompetent service, I just wanted my money back.

Max quoted a sum and said the check would be in the mail.  When it arrived three days later, it was for a smaller amount.  I objected.  The store’s bookkeeper called me back.

“This isn’t what I’m owed,” I said.

“I see,” she said.  “You thought you were owed more.”

“No, I was told I was owed more.”

This went on for several boring minutes, until she said she’d send a check for the amount I thought I was owed and I said I’d cash the check, since I had been told I was owed the amount.  We were talking about a grand total of maybe $35, but by that time, I was prepared to climb mountain ranges and swim drainage ditches to get  what had come to represent my fair share of the American dream.

The check came and it didn’t bounce, but I still felt like the Big Lebowski: In the midst of some dumb controversy, a principle had been violated.  The Dude just wanted his rug back and I just wanted an apology, but instead, everybody was pissing all over the place, which kind of ruined the mood.

So, since no one else seems to know a damned thing about a good apology, it’s left up to me — a Southern female of a certain age and therefore an accomplished apologizer — to lay down a few rules for saying you’re sorry:

1) Make it sincere and heartfelt.  No sarcasm, no offhandedness.

2) Keep it personal and take responsibility for what’s happened.  Anybody saying, “Mistakes were made” will get his or her mouth washed out with soap.

3) Repeat as often as necessary.

4) Do not qualify with “If you were offended … ”  I think it’s safe to assume somebody’s offended.

5) Realize that “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” was a bad line in an old book.  The truth is, love means having to say you’re sorry all the time — and business apologies should occur at an even higher rate.

6) You can relax, once you’ve delivered a good apology.  After all, you may have screwed up, but you’ve done what you could to rectify the matter.

What’s funny to me is that this is all so easy to do, it’s the right thing to do, and it’s good business to do it.  Why is that so hard for these knuckleheads to learn?

(Copyright 2010 by Ruth Pennebaker)