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Here we are, a year later, and still a dapper young couple. Nothing has been more difficult than living apart for 5 months. I'm going to Durham this weekend and have an interview. I have an interview after next weekend as well. Pray that all goes well and that I can be in Durham with Jami soon. This week has been an arduous week - I've been ill, feverish, and work has been difficult. Emotionally I'm a bit at loose ends. Today in our men's prayer group I learned that I'm not the only one going through some form of that emotional and physical stress. We all have things going on in our lives that wear on us.
Tomorrow is a tough day for me: going to work at 7 am, having a conference with my supervisor and her supervisor -and I discovered this tonight: another supervisor- at CCCG, and then getting on a plane and flying to Durham to be with Jami - which is the highlight of the day.
This may all be too personal to write in a blog. I do typically venture into the realm of arcania or some imaginative flight. But so be it.
Today as I lay sleeping, slipping in and out of hearing NPR on my computer (which is the only way to listen to NPR in Atlanta - Jami and I often wonder why Atlanta has such a poor NPR station, while Chapel Hill has such a good one), I was grateful for being loved. I knew that no matter how difficult things might seem, that love is always victorious. I don't mean victorious in a militaristic way, but in a more enveloping way.
I told my friends in the prayer group tonight that I'd had a mystic experience yesterday. I stood on the quad at Columbia and I looked up in the sky, on one side of me a long gray cloud and on the other a long white cloud, and all the sounds, the thrumming of the air compressors, the chirping of the birds, the whoosh of the wind, were part of a musical piece - the sounds of people playing, the traffic - for a lover of Ives and Boulez this is no stretch: this is what music is. I stood there aware that I was surrounded by love, by Jami's, by my counselor's, by my friends', and by God's, and it seemed to be the most weighty fact of the universe, more weighty than a black hole or neutron star. I felt the mass of love as a pressure passing through all the world, embracing, enveloping, holding all the lost, alone, too busy, over focused souls in the world. I felt it and was aware of it, though I hadn't been seeking it. I had been praying to be lifted out of my sadness at being separated, at feeling alone at work. And there I was and there it was. I told this to my friends, and one of them, who had been playing frisbee golf on the quad said, "that's what you were doing." I asked him if I had seemed strange standing there, and he said no, just that I had looked deep in thought.

I can't wait to see Jami this weekend

Here's Jami last May at the Decatur arts festival. It is possible that she will write and complain that this picture is a bad one; I agree that this picture (like any picture) fails to give the full sense of wit and insight. I think that the one in front of Keat's house does that well. I do like this photo. What a wonderful smile.
After 19 days of living apart, I'm flying back to Durham.

Hey Beautiful

Jami, thankfully, loves puns. She may aver otherwise, but, as I was telling someone today, eating blue cheese burgers with bacon at the Brick Store, Michael McLaughlin, I think, who I was telling, describing our cats, which Jami had named, of which two, Thelma and Louise, refer to a movie, which Michael found hilarious, not the movie, but the naming of the cats, and two, Catalina and Cleocatra, both "cat" puns, that it would seem that she protests too vociferously about my puns, when she entertains the habit on her own and nurtures her own wordplay.
[a 92 word sentence: hold the applause, a tour de force of syntax, a taxing of syntactical tacticianation; a grammar phone home about] She had a pun for me tonight on the phone, which I can't recall right now, but I'm sure that she remembers. What I did come up with was this idea that in the Old Testament, ancient Israel, olden Palestine, that huge mobs would form on the seventh day, causing no end of interference with human intercourse, and these mobs would prowl the country side, sightseeing as it were, but causing societal breakdowns; all this because of these wandering groups on the seventh day, and so these so called "sabbath-tours" had to be stopped.
Look at that smile up there. That is the most beautiful smile in the world. And she's bringing that smile here this Friday.

Today's beautiful smile

This weekend we went to the Decatur Arts Festival. Here's Jami looking like Monica Vitti, all elegant and Italian. One of our continuing conversations is how she's at heart Italian and, as she claims, that I am at heart English. All because I ordered steak at an Italian restaurant in London. Since then I've tried to make the case that steak is a perfectly traditional Italian meal. I've since had a Tuscan steak at a restaurant here, and I've made the inference that "my it might certainly seem that steak is common in Italy after all, and that Tuscany would be the Pampas [a reference the steak producing area of Argentina] of Italy." [at which point Jami whacked me on the head, almost as if she were exasperated at the lengths I've attempted to protest any resident "Englishness" I might be said to possess] What I've tried to maintain is that back in the "old country" where I grew up [a land not unlike present-day north-central Georgia] that it was common to have steak as an extension of an Italianate [what we'd once observed that an Italian ate] identity. This may be an argument that has no real resolution. Certainly I have a fondness for meat that might seem to belie a typical Italian proclivity for sea food and pasta. Certainly Jami, who's actually been to Italy, might be considered to be more of an expert on Italy and what constitutes an Italian sensibility than me. Still my own interior reality requires that I continue to state my own standing-togetherness with Italian culture, even as I order a nice steak.
Still it's difficult to argue with someone as beautiful and intelligent as Jami.

I interrupt my apocalyptic ramblings

I have to interrupt this rambling of mine to put up a picture of the most beautiful woman on the planet. I took this photo last summer when we were walking along the Art Loeb trail above the parkway. We were with Tom and Suzanne and their daughters Jane Margret and Elizabeth. We're still having fun and she's still the one.

How beautiful you are

Almost a year ago, the morning I was graduating from Columbia, I took this photo of Jami, and I'm almost certain she didn't like it, what with the chin being cut off and the slight distortion of the camera angle; but for me, every time I see her smile and hear her voice, my heart is strangely warmed.

Most beautiful woman in the world

A year ago Monday, Shakespeare's birthday, I proposed to Jami and she said yes. A fateful day for both of us. Every day, the happiness of sharing life with her, rushes through my soul, like a spring gust through the trees.