by Lisa McKay
“Oh it’s worse than that,” Mum said cheerfully when I mentioned this over breakfast. “The report I checked said ‘thunderstorms likely all day.’”
I’m a bit anxious about this, and a bit upset that I’m anxious. I want to be the sort of person who is unruffled by the prospect of rain on her wedding day. I want to be cheerfully adaptable. But I have to admit that I really do hope it doesn’t rain on my wedding day. Not when we’re getting married in the garden. Outside. And having our reception in a tent.
“I bought you this just in case it does rain,” Mum said, almost as an afterthought, darting into the dinning room and coming back with an enormous, vibrant and multicolored golf umbrella.
Just looking at this umbrella made me feel better. It may well not go as we have hoped and planned tomorrow. It may well rain. But we will have a rainbow-colorful umbrella that screams happy and will look great in photographs.
Despite the storms that threaten, I’m glad we decided to get married here. I’ve never lived here – Mum and Dad have lived here only six years themselves. But here is the place I’ve been coming to relax, regroup, and re-connect with myself for years. Here, the place where Mike and I first got to know one another face-to-face. Here, the place of green grass, crimson flowers, sugar-cane fields, river, beach, and the dense inscrutable blue of the Pacific Ocean – all spread out in front of me as a feast. Here is about as close to a place called home as I can get.
*
Home has been more about people than place to me for a long time now, but what I’m still learning is that it can’t be all about people, either.
As recently as three months ago I forgot this yet again.
We wanted to write our own wedding vows, Mike and I, and we also wanted to be in sync with what we would promise each other on the day. So we each put some thought into the vows separately and then came together with our drafts to blend them into one unified declaration.
I think my favorite section of our vows is what we settled on for the ring exchange: “As I give you this ring, I give you my heart as a sanctuary. I give you myself as a faithful companion to celebrate life with. I give you my promise that as I choose you today, so I will choose you tomorrow. This is our covenant.”
To get to these four simple sentences, we each had to make a compromise that initially felt quite painful.
“We can’t say it that way,” Mike said when he saw my draft. “The second sentence ends with a preposition.”
“What’s a preposition?” I asked.
Mike looked at me, suspicious.
“You,” he said, “are a novelist. How can you possibly not know what a preposition is?”
“Hey,” I said a trifle sharply. “Six countries. Six schools. English grammar got lost somewhere along the way, possibly while I was busy learning Shona in Zimbabwe.”
“You can’t end a sentence with the word with,” Mike said. “It’s just wrong. Another way to say it would be ‘I give you myself as a faithful companion with whom to celebrate life.’”
“That sounds lame,” I said, displaying a vocabulary every bit as impressive as my grasp on grammar.
“Well, at least it’s correct.”
“But it sounds dumb,” I said. “Clumsy. Formal. It doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of our vows. Who cares if it’s correct if it sounds dumb?”
Mike eventually shifted on that issue and I shifted on this one: When I first drafted this section, I put an extra sentence in there. That sentence was “You will be home to me.”
“I don’t like that,” Mike said when he saw it. “It doesn’t work.”
I was initially disappointed, but there was something in me that sensed he might just be right, so I took it out without making too much of a fuss, and now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to mull it over, I do think he was right after all. For one thing, that phrase is arguably less a promise than it is a statement, or even a demand.
I hadn’t intended that. I had intended that sentence to evoke all that is most positive in the ideal of home – comfort, continuity, understanding, haven, refuge, rest, encouragement, wholeness – the sum total of all that is most precious and valuable in life. I had intended it as a promise along the lines of “I will seek these things in you, for you, and with you.”
The problem here lies in the first part of that promise that I was trying to craft, the idea that it’s possible to find all of that in someone else. It’s too much to expect (or even hope for) from any one person, even your lover. It’s too much to expect from other people altogether.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think people are key. Relationships are primary, perhaps even central, to the concept of home. It’s always been people who granted the most meaning and emotional heft to place for me, not the other way around. The happiest times of my life have been steeped in my richest community experiences. They had far less to do with where I was than with who was there with me.
I am reminded of a day several years ago when I was returning to L.A. from Amsterdam after a string of work trips. I was exhausted and dazed in that way that I get after too many sterile announcements about seat belts, life jackets, baggage carousels, and what color sign you can find the ride-share vans under. Familiarity is not always a good thing, and Los Angeles Airport is a case in point. It is one place where repetition has definitely not bred the happy emotional resonance we all want to associate with home. I dislike that airport with a passion that is rather unreasonable in magnitude and intensity.
That day, however, I didn’t have to drag myself through collecting my bags or endure a circuitous shared ride back to my apartment. That day, when I came down the escalators near baggage claim, four familiar faces were waiting. They’d figured out which plane I would be on and decided to surprise me at the airport. They greeted me with homemade signs that read, “Welcome home!” and, “There’s no place like home!!” And suddenly I was home in that moment, even in that airport, because they were there.
But friends and family are only part of the puzzle of home. They are the biggest and most important part, I do believe, but still only part. There is another level to home, a level where other people, no matter how close and loving, have only so much access and impact. A level everyone ultimately plumbs alone.
*
The word home comes from a root meaning “the place where one lies.” The phrase refers to our physical place of residence and rest, our bed, but it also prompts me to consider where the core of the “one” that is me – who I am, my soul – lies. It makes me think of identity, purpose, passion, and being at home in my own skin.
This one is a work in progress.
Last night my sister and girlfriends organized a little pre-wedding girls night. There were eight of us, Champagne, chocolate, strawberries, some practical pajamas, some not-so-practical saucy red lingerie, lots of chatter, and a surprise videotape.
Two of my bridesmaids, Tash and Ani, had decided that since none of my friends had met Mike more than once and therefore had quite a limited basis for deciding whether to give this marriage their stamp of approval, perhaps it might be a good idea to concoct a test to see how in sync Mike and I are with each other. So they cornered Mike with a video camera, asked him a long list of questions, and taped his responses. Then they brought this video to the party and played it bit by bit, stopping at the appropriate places (after they’d asked a question and before Mike answered) to make me guess what his answer would be.
This might sound like a bit of lighthearted fun, but those two went to town with their questions. They were hard!
What first attracted you to Lisa?
What do you like most about Lisa?
What do you think Lisa likes most about you?
That was just the warm-up. In fourteen minutes of footage they also covered what physical attributes of mine Mike likes the most and which of his he thinks I like? Ideal travel destinations? How many kids, if any, do we both want? How does Mike feel about my writing essays about the trials and tribulati
ons of married life? If he were on a hike with me and I decided I’d had enough, sat down, and refused to go on, what would he do? What does Mike think of my driving, my cooking, and my house-cleaning? What is my favorite color? What really turns me on?
Mike was calm, composed and a perfect gentleman (except when he said that although he chose to believe that I was capable of house-cleaning, he had yet to see any evidence that this was true). The only time he looked completely panicked was when he was asked about my favorite color.
“What’s Lisa’s favorite color?” Mike repeated, laughing and bewildered. “I have no idea. Por favor! Is it … uh … uh …”
“This is a bonus question for bonus points,” Tash taunted him from off-screen.
“Did she put it in any essays?” Mike said. “How am I supposed to know Lisa’s favorite color? Um … is it … blue?”
Wrong. Favorite-color fail.
But I was both heartened and a little relieved to see that we are pretty much in sync on most of the other questions. I didn’t know what Mike was going to pinpoint as what he likes most about me, but this is what he said: “I like most Lisa’s confidence in who she is and how she approaches the world around her, wishing to engage in it and striving to respond to others as she is able.”
Quite apart from the fact that my heart melted faster than butter under an equatorial sun listening to him say this, it was encouraging. When I think about being at home in my own skin, I think of confidence – a confidence that springs from exercising your strengths, understanding what you value, and having a clear sense of purpose.
Purpose is something Mike and I have spent a lot of time talking about. In the letters we exchanged before we met for the first time in Australia, we used the word purpose forty-two times. It is something that I’m still getting a handle on in my own life, and something I don’t think should ever harden into something immutable. But there have been several grindstones that have contributed to the sharpening of my own sense of purpose during the last five years. Work has been one such grindstone, writing another, faith a third. I’m far less sure of the semantics of faith than I was a decade ago. The language of church doesn’t fit me completely, and unshakable certainty in any domain scares me. But I do believe that I am part of a meaningful story that’s far bigger and more important than just my own thread, and I believe that the heart of God is love.
Purpose. Passion. Meaning.
Without some baseline sense of these in your life, you may feel at home some places, or with some people, but you won’t ever feel fully at home in yourself.
*
After Mike proposed and before he left for PNG again at the end of May, we talked engagement rings. Or, rather, we talked the framework of budget, since I didn’t really have a clue what I wanted.
After he left, I had no idea where to start looking.
I thought I would quite like a ring of some sort, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted a diamond. I thought I might like an opal. Not a white one – they’ve always seemed rather milky and boring – but a black opal. There’s something fascinating about how vivid fragments of blue, green, gold and red show up all fleeting and fiery in the depths of that dark stone. Black opals that are mostly blue and green look like earth as viewed from the moon – mysterious, magical, fecund.
It turns out, though, that opals bear one more similarity to planet Earth: they are quite fragile and prone to scratching and chipping if knocked about. So in the end I gave up on the idea of opals and returned to diamonds. After four months of engagement, three trips to Robbins Brothers, two changes of mind, and a partridge in a pear tree, I finally decided on an engagement ring. Two weeks after Mike arrived in Los Angeles in September we went to finalize the transaction.
“We just bought a small car for your finger,” Mike said on the way home, shell-shocked.
“Well, yes. A small secondhand, car,” I said and added quickly, “but it will be much more beautiful than a car.”
There was an extended pause.
“At least this won’t lose value like an actual car would,” I said. “That could come in handy.”
“How’s that?” Mike asked.
“Well, you know, we might need to barter it for something someday,” I said. “Like safe passage on a boat during a military coup.”
There was another extended pause.
“I cannot believe you said that less than ten minutes after I signed the bill,” Mike said.
“I would take you with me on the boat,” I said.
“This is one of those times when you should just stop talking,” Mike said.
“Hey!” I said. “I was trying to save your life.”
“Yet all I can see is all the dirt flying out of that hole you’re digging there,” Mike said.
I decided to stop talking until I figured out whether Mike was actually upset. I was still trying to figure it out when we got back to my place fifteen minutes later.
Six weeks later the ring was ready and we went to pick it up. When they opened the box I was silent with awe. I had been right – it was much more beautiful than a car. Mike looked at it thoughtfully.
“Wow,” he said. “It’s really pretty. I’m going to miss it when we have to barter it for boat tickets.”
I’ve never been much of a ring person, so I’ve been somewhat surprised by how much I love my engagement ring. After not even being sure I wanted one diamond, I ended up choosing a ring with three of them – a stone in the center flanked by two smaller ones. I love the delicacy of it, the symmetry, the sparkle as all those facets bounce light at me.
A single-faceted diamond wouldn’t shine in nearly the same way, and perhaps that’s a little like home. Place, people, purpose – those are all large, important facets in the lodestone of home. So is safety. So is familiarity in any loved form, and feeling understood and accepted and a contented sort of cozy. In between those defining planes, life has engraved dozens of other smaller facets on my own unique vision of home. They form a mélange of memory and sensation that can momentarily wink up at me, beautiful.
The feeling that comes when I write something that sings.
The message and the music of the song Amazing Grace.
The porch swing on the back deck of this house. My blue couch in L.A. In Mike’s arms.
Jacaranda flowers. Great books. Flannel pajamas.
Warm, slippery mango. A grassy sauvignon blanc. Takeout Indian on the beach. Chili barbecued prawns. Orange chicken and chow mein. My grandmother’s passion-fruit sponge cake.
The smell of salt water, wood smoke, eucalyptus, mosquito repellant, diesel fuel, jasmine.
The plangent chime of my engagement ring landing in the Turkish pottery bowl on my bedside table when I take it off at night.
*
I, Lisa McKay, choose you, Michael Wolfe, as my life partner, the one I commit to love. I pledge to cherish and honor you regardless of circumstances, in the pressures of the present and the uncertainties of the future, loving what I do know of you, trusting what I do not yet know.
I promise to grow in mind and spirit with you, and support you in fulfilling your hopes and dreams. I promise to remain with you, whatever afflictions may befall. I commit to sharing with you life’s joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains from this day forward until death do us part.
*
I am going to put on a beautiful dress tomorrow and walk down a grassy aisle littered with frangipanis to the celestial sounds of Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission. And then I will make these promises.
In the end I am not going to promise or demand that Mike will be home to me – after a certain point in life, perhaps home is more something you make than something you have, anyway. But I will, in essence, be promising to fashion a home with him.
I have no idea what places, people, and purposes that will come to mean.
This scares the part of me that longs for the white-picket-fence version of home, that wants to predict and control the future and that yearns for the g
rounding grace of routine. It thrills the part of me that longs for the sharp spur of purpose to drive me from my comfort zone, that craves the cold-shower shock of novelty and the adventures of dirt roads less traveled. I’m not sure that these paradoxical longings will ever be fully reconciled – I’m no longer sure that’s even the point. I am, however, certain that I want Mike to be beside me whatever form home might take for me in the future. I am convinced that a white picket fence with him would be better than bumping down a dirt road without him and that traveling a dirt road together would beat out a white picket fence that’s mine alone. That sort of peaceful surety is worth following down an aisle and across the world, don’t you think?
I do.
###
Acknowledgements
As usual, writing this book has been a longer and more challenging journey than I had anticipated. Many people have supported and encouraged me along the way. I especially want to thank …
All the wonderful strangers who posted online reviews after reading my hands came away red and wrote me letters sharing their thoughts and asking when my next book would be coming out.
Andy McGuire for calling Hands my “first novel” – words that forced me to explore the possibility of a second book.
Chip MacGregor for believing in the big picture of me as a writer, for providing helpful input on the first draft, for championing this book and for tracking with my story.
Jennifer Anthony, Lisa Borden, Tristan Clements, Leah Curtis, Sarah Kelly, Andy McGuire, Chip MacGregor, Lloyd McKay, Merrilyn McKay, Hilary Reed, Janet Shriberg, Erica Sloan, Natasha White, and Michelle Williams for reading the first draft and providing much useful feedback and encouragement to keep going.
Joslyne Decker and Amy Lyles Wilson for their invaluable and detailed input on the second draft.
Fellow authors Nicole Baart, Leeana Tankersley, Susan Meissner, Gina Holmes, Lisa Samson, Torre DeRoche and Lisa Borden for their encouragement and input.
Ryan for being casually good humored when I emailed him a draft of this book and admitted I had e-stalked him.