Throwaway Moments

In the previous post, I said there would be just one more and it would be about me and moving on...I lied. I don't think a whole day had gone by after I posted "Lessons from Bettie's Challenge" before I realized that there was one more bullet point that I wanted to add to the list of "...things that I would do differently if I had the chance." So I'm going to add that here...then we can talk about "moving on", whatever that means. (Oh, and by the way...that topic will take several posts all by itself.)

Good marriages are comfortable. Bettie and I had a good marriage. To experience your mate's death is to realize the enormous contrast between comfortable and uncomfortable.

But I'd like to suggest here that the contrast that counts isn't between comfortable and uncomfortable, but between comfortable and fabulous (or you can insert your favorite superlative, descriptive of a marriage that is way above simply "comfortable"). Now I don't want to suggest that Bettie and I didn't have any "fabulous" in ours...we did. Just not enough.

Just being in one another's presence is comfortable. Having understanding pass between the two of you without a word being spoken is priceless, as the commercial says. And looking back over a long marriage, you can see a whole lot of that unspoken, comfortable, togetherness:

• I'm sitting on the family room couch, across from the kitchen, reading the paper, and she is right there in the kitchen;
• I'm working in the yard, near the driveway and she slowly drives by and smiles, off to shopping;
• I'm in the office, preoccupied with something on the computer and she passes by the door;

Our days were filled with these throwaway moments. Nothing was said, nothing needed to be. We were together...we always would be. It was sweet.

Do you have any idea what I would give now to have just one of those moments back? I can tell you I wouldn't throw it away. Now I'm like a man in a desert, dying of thirst and thinking of all the times I ran water down the drain, waiting for a cold drink.

If you think about it, you realize that an awful lot of our lives are these simple, routine, comfortable, throwaway moments, just strung together. And it pretty much has to be that way doesn't it? If we tried to make every moment "special", no moment would be and the word would lose its meaning.

I don't know what the proper ratio between throwaway and special moments is, but I know I didn't get it right with Bettie. If she were to walk past the office door now as I sit here, preoccupied with this drivel on the computer, I can guarantee the moment would not be thrown away. I would get up, go to her, take her by the shoulders, look into her eyes and say: "Honey, do you have any idea how very special you are to me? Probably not. Well it is a lot!" I'd give her a squeeze or a peck on the lips and send her back on her mission. Total elapsed time: probably about 30 seconds.

What is the ideal ratio? One of those moments a day? Two? Several? If I'm given the chance with another...well that's for a future post. But lets just say, If I had it to do over again, I would recycle a considerable number of those thrown away moments, into something much more memorable.