The Ghost Of St. Patrick’s Day Past

It’s 8:20 in the morning, and that’s about the time my wife and I woke up in my apartment on St. Patrick’s Day, fourteen years ago, and then we had some more sex and then we carefully, solemnly agreed to rip our existing lives to shreds.

I wrote all about it last Mother’s Day, so there’s no point in walking you through it again.  We eloped, that’s the short version, although usually you elope and get married.  We simply began refering to each other that way, and it was a year and a half before we went down to the courthouse and made it official.

A slick way to do it – we have two anniversaries, if that does anything for you.  And we also have a startling, vivid appreciation for all the things we have, since we can both remember when every single item we owned fit in the cab of a gray Nissan truck named Steve.

Yes, Steve.  So what?

An unemployed, poetry-slinging, long-haired dude and his wisecracking, whiskey-drinking girl, hitting the road in a truck with just a few hundred bucks to their names.  As you can imagine, expectations were low.

But it was too late for expectations.  By the time anyone knew what we’d done, we were in a hotel room three hundred miles away.  Marilyn had quit her job that morning, and had a boyfriend with a brand new “ex” in front of his title, and we had to stop at Walmart to buy her a pair of jeans, because she didn’t own any pants.

One dress, one purse, and two shoes, blogosphere.  That’s all she owned, as of St. Patricks Day, 1997.

Something I don’t think about as often as the morning we left – that first night hundreds of miles away, an army of outraged social journalists behind us, swarming like insects, feasting on the drama.  Outraged – by what?  By our audacity?  Our lack of interest in permission or propriety?  Our unaplogetic nihilism, our unwavering conviction?  Our complete lack of fear?  What?

Lying in a hotel room that night, we were already calling each other husband and wife.  We’d known each other five and a half weeks, and most people agreed I had gone crazy months ago, anyway.  But we were driven by something, and it was so much easier for everyone else to believe that it was just whiskey and smoke.

But it wasn’t, we told them – the few contacts we made back home.  It was magic,  It was sorcery.  It was Zen.  It was the spirit of Bigfoot.  It was something all around us that we had never seen before, and we weren’t going to ignore it, not for anything.  Not for Columbus, Ohio, and no – not for you.

Yes, and that night, lying there looking at a strange ceiling with a brand new wife beside me, there was a crackling, electrical certainty that there was no going back now, not ever.  We couldn’t just wake up and drive back to our old lives, apologize sheepishly and get back to work.  Because we had destroyed them, burned them like bridges to protect us from our weaker Future Selves.

How did we know?  How could we possibly have known?  I mean, we didn’t even realize it was St. Patrick’s Day – can you believe that?

You’re ruining your lives, they told us – and for all we know, we were.  Maybe we’d both be millionaires by now, if we hadn’t weighed each other down.  It didn’t matter and it doesn’t now - we didn’t have a choice.

The certainty we felt about what we were to each other was beyond debate.  It was destiny with a bottle of whiskey in its hand, true love wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and no, I’m afraid it wasn’t very nice.  People think of love and they think it’s a baby with a bow and arrow, or an angel with a wand, but it’s not.

True love is a behemoth from the depths of the human mind, and its ear-splitting roar is unmistakeable, and it leaves a vast, sizzling path of destruction that you can see from space.  Anything less is just your inner child, whining for a belly rub.

Fourteen years ago we burned every last drop of fuel in our tanks, running from the stagnant lives that so many people believed were our duties to hold onto, and their right to demand, and all through the years we’ve been listening to them mutter just out of ear shot or right to our faces – wherever they want to mutter.  There’s no stopping the muttering.  Because there was no way this way going to work, just ask them as they sat there with their easy choices and well-marked paths.  We were inconsiderate and feckless and irrational and doomed.

We conceived a child within five more weeks.  On purpose.  And again, no one wanted to believe that.  It was more fun to believe that this beautiful girl was an accidental nail in our future’s coffin, the mark of our own idiocy.  Imagine people saying such things with smirks on their faces – Fuck You.

The coffee shops started taking bets – how soon would this airplane hit the ground?  A year?  Two?  What’s the over/under?

Yes and fourteen years later, we’ve adopted two more daughters and all around us, we’ve seen marriages rise and crumble to the ground, and if hasn’t been easy or pretty, or anything out of a storybook – certainly not.

But we’re still standing here, and I can’t help notice that folks are running out of questions.  Did anybody back then bet we’d last fourteen years, our grins intact, riding our ancient, goliath passion into the next fourteen?

Well, tell us and our kids and the Ghost of St. Patrick’s Day Past all about it – we’re hanging around together for the fifteenth time today, and we’re all ears.

.

.

.

Earlier:  A Religion of Five
.

And:  Tommy and Marilyn