I’m kind of an important guy — Part 1

A photo image unaltered except for lighting adjustments. The 

reflections are not photoshopped, I took this pic staring at a 

computer screen, and I didn’t fix my face, my wrinkled brow, 

my vanishing hairline, or my cheap cock-eyed reading glasses.

Part 1

In three months I’ll be 71. I have a wife I’ve been with for 20 years. Some days she can’t stand me. Some days she doesn’t want to live without me. I feel the same way about her. Opposites attract is a nice romantic premise but it usually disguises deeper affinities. My wife studied Math and German and Russian in college and I studied English Literature and History, and my language studies were in French, Latin, and Attic Greek. We quarrel about Latin because she knows the language of the Mass, and I know the language and pronunciation of Caesar and Vergil. 

We’re both from Jersey, but different parts. Everyone in Jersey is from different parts. I come from below the Turnpike, where all the towns have been 60 percent black since the Civil War, where we were a stop on the Underground Railroad. She’s from a few counties north, where town after town and street after street live lives close enough together that the South is a distant idea, where everything from North Carolina to Louisiana is alien, speaking a different language. 

But it’s not the opposites that attract. It’s the similarities. We’re both Alphas. She has a hair trigger temper; mine after the opposing draw is also deadly. We have been known to shout. We both erupt on sleight provocation, get furious, subside quickly. Our dissimilarities make us complementary in some regards, according to the folk wisdom. I help translate French movie subtitles to her, she continuously translates Cyrillic Russian references in terms I would understand, and we acquaint each other with the subtleties.

Our business experience is analogous but different. She was a boss of documentation in a military computer development process where documentation is not only indispensable but intrinsic to product. Her male colleagues were not only respectful of her but terrifiable if that is a word. She was an Alpha’s Alpha in the most masculine of all corporations. 

I was also immersed in computer technology and its documentation in an entirely different sphere. I wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of the products in the microprocessor revolution, first as an educated consumer/reviewer/editor, then as an advocate (and consultant) of what one of the Big Eight computer companies had to do to remain competitive in a cutthroat market. I began as a lowly competitive analyst and ended my big company computer career a little over one year later writing an RFP for an innovative research effort into information technology for a conference room full of VPs that could have forestalled the nosedive into unstructured slapstick algorithms that have made your computer streams slower today than you know they are. They ignored my best, personally researched savior source for a Big 8 snowjob, and I resigned the company to become a consultant in a different field. 

In our separate realms, we both learned about the technology. We were both intimidating presences. Now we sit on the couch intimidating each other.

Not what brought us together in the end. We met long before we got together. Working in the nuclear industry, shortly after TMI, she was my boss’s boss. We were both fighting at different levels to improve the quality of nuclear documentation. What we discovered in deepest common was the necessity of excellent English writing in the documentation of American nuclear documents. We also discovered that I thought she was a diminutive red-haired lioness, and she thought, after we came to know each other better, that I was a breakthrough writer of fiction with a pretty face. She’s my Boudica.

I’m an important guy because I’m with Pat, the strongest, toughest, stubbornest woman I’ve ever known. Why would I do that if I were a misogynist? I wouldn’t.

Stay tuned for Part 2…