June 16

For most people who think about dates this is the day that Bloom walked around Dublin finally coming home to his wife Molly, James Joyce's imaginative retelling of the plot of Homer's Odyssey.  In 2016 it was also the sixtieth anniversary of the day I married the woman who bore me four children.  I might have said my soul mate but that was not really true and we divorced with equal amounts of sorrow and relief after twenty years.  She remains probably the most important fixture in my imagination, being the partner par excellence in a marriage that was a powerful emotional, intellectual, sexual adventure until it wasn't anymore.  She taught me so much about design, aesthetics, taste, being as she was an architect and an apostle of the Bauhaus aesthetic of which I, child of the upper middle (tasteless) class of Midwesterners, had no notion.  We met and got along famously in the sack, as they used to say, as well as over quite a few martinis at one sitting or should I say drinking? At twenty five I had never tried much hard liquor so that was definitely a novelty, more than that, she was only the second woman with whom I had ever had sexual experience, my first wife of four years having died just two months previous--before I and the second lady embarked upon a steady diet of mad sexual congress.  What is more, I had spent the past six or so years since I became pubescent aggressively getting into the pants of every male whose path I crossed.  So it was an interesting meeting of bodies and minds and we got along famously and often of course also were quite estranged, and eventually tired of one another, engrossed in our careers and other relationships.  But the most important thing is that we parented four fabulous children in five years, and to be honest, none of them by choice or eagerly anticipated.  She was just stupid about how to use a diaphragm and I was just ignorant, and lazy; and then there were all those martinis.  These four children were an enormous burden; we had to work really hard parenting them.  She gave up her career for ten years, we both drank ourselves silly to keep a happy face on parenting.  But life was a lot of fun if a lot of work.  Oh, the children in those teenage years!  I couldn't believe this was happening to us!  We were an interesting twosome.  Growing more and more estranged in the Sturm und Drang of it all, but not throwing the dishes or punching each other out nor even shouting.  Being upper class WASP has its virtues, even if repression is supposedly a bad thing.  Out of it all came four of the most amazing fantastic youngsters, fully realized individuals, bright, witty, nasty, oh, all those things.  And now they are in their fifties. Can you believe it?  I sometimes can't, nor can I share this exclamatory question with my ex-wife because she is dead now for the past decade.  I would like to say to her, even if I know she would scrunch up her face in a contemptuous disbelief, that the marriage and these children were the greatest thing that ever happened to me.  It's Father's Day, I would shout out, and she would snort and snicker and mutter "Hallmark Card idiot!"