Married

Patriot jet team celebrating our marriage

I’m sitting next to Babe on an airplane listening to jazz: Forever by Chick Corea, Stanley Clark and Lenny White.  It is an excellent CD.  We are on the way to Barcelona for a few weeks of climbing in Spain and Sardinia.  Although I swore two years ago that I would never get married again, we are on our honeymoon.  Babe and I tied the knot last Friday night in Nevada where we spent three days at the Reno Air Races.  In attendance were my oldest son Colin and Lori’s sister Toni.  It took a total of 55 minutes from the time the limousine picked the four of us up at the hotel until we were dropped back off.  That included a stop to pick up our marriage license at the Court House that is open until midnight 365 days a year.  We had a nice little ceremony actually, with very friendly people at one of the many marriage establishments on the strip.  All marriage ceremonies should be so short.

Take me to the altar Elvis

Babe was stunning in her wedding dress provided by our good friend Gurs (Sangeet) Khalsa who owns Island Importers.  His company specializes in mail order wedding clothes made in Bali.  They are managed by another good friend and our neighbor Narayan who measured us and made sure everything arrived on time.  I was, of course, absolutely splendid in my linen suit that Gurs provided as well.  Only a few weeks earlier Gurs was frantically pounding on our door late at night as water from my condo flooded his business and inventory below after I left the water running in my stopped-up kitchen sink.  That he was there at all is somewhat of a miracle since he lives 30 miles away and rarely visits the business that late.  Fortunately, he caught it just in time and all the clothes were poly-bagged.  We spent the rest of the evening mopping up and drinking whiskey.

And under that dress she is wearing exactly: nothing.

Some of my friends have wondered out loud why I am getting married again.  Babe and I have been together exclusively for nearly three years and there was absolutely no pressure by either of us to formalize our relationship.  We were both divorced after 24 years of marriage; her divorce as nasty as they get, mine much more civil.  Certainly, I feel like I’ve met the perfect partner. In the words of Rumi, “Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.  They're in each other all along.”  That is so true in our case; Babe feels like the female version of me in many ways.

The Urban Dictionary defines Lori (her real name) as, “The most wonderful person in the world. Kind, sweet, beautiful, smart, funny, loving, caring, gentle, perfect in every way. The one you love for all your life. Crazy hot girl, Lori possesses attributes absent in 99.9% of women: truly a lucky find.”   That pretty much sums up how I feel about her, but none of that is reason enough to get married at our age with all five of our sons on their own or off to college.

Always the perfectionist, Babe had purchased the online book Blow by Blow (www.blowtips.com) that promised “Expert Tips on How to Give Mind-Blowing Blow Jobs”.  Seriously, how do you not fall in love with a woman that buys and studies a book like that, quizzes me endlessly on the subject and believes the key to success is practice, practice, practice?  (Turns out the book is full of great, practical advice and should probably be required reading for young wives).  Still, not enough of a reason to tie the knot.

Mr. and Mrs. Bowman

"We'll take the $211 package"

My parents just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, my grandparents made it past their 50th before the death of my grandfather, and my brothers and sister are still happily married to their first spouses; all at least 20 years later.  I do admit to being a little envious of them, as I don’t like failing at anything.   I have no doubt Babe and I will be together until one of us dies, a feeling I have never had before.

But the primary reason for getting married is financial. Babe came out of her marriage over $75,000 in debt, under water on her mortgage and with no assets besides the clothes on her back and a 10-year old used car.  Whatever my ex-wife thinks about me, the one thing I know for sure is that her financial security is guaranteed for life.  Babe, on the other hand, can’t afford medical insurance and spends most of her free cash paying off her middle son’s student loan and helping her youngest son go to college.  Her far flung and estranged nuclear family is the polar opposite of my extremely close knit extended family; epitomized by the fact that her oldest son still won’t let her see her only grandchild.   The fact is that if I died tomorrow Babe would be out on the street well below the poverty line.  Given my penchant for high risk adventure, I just couldn’t live with that possibility.

Realizing that also caused me to reflect on the fact that some of our gay friends are in the same boat but don’t have the option of getting married.  That is simply not fair, compassionate or sensible.   It confounds me that we continue to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation in this day and age. 

Staying in Reno we are bombarded by political ads every time we turn on the TV.  Nevada is one of the battleground states this election and both sides are spewing bullshit at every opportunity.  I subscribe to Isaac Asimov’s theory that anyone who wants to run for political office shouldn’t be allowed to; the qualified should be dragged kicking and screaming into office to serve.  Kind of like the draft or jury selection.   But after throwing my vote away for years on the Libertarian Party, I now cast my independent vote on the lesser of two evils between the major party candidates.

Sign of the times

Like most people I was hoping Obama would pull our country together.   That hasn’t happened, and I am not happy with his plans to redistribute wealth by increasing the tax burden on high wage earners (although they should not be allowed to scam the system either).   As someone who has worked extensively with federal bureaucrats, I also don’t want the government running anything but essential social services.  The lack of accountability in the federal bureaucracy drives me crazy.  Many of my favorite politicians are Republican: Teddy Roosevelt being at the top of the list.   Obama would do well to take a page from Teddy’s book who pushed through some monumental changes in this country by taking on his own natural constituents when needed.  As a fiscal conservative who believes in a strong military, minimal federal oversight, the right to bear arms and personal freedom, I am a natural for the Republican Party.

But there is no way I can vote for a party that has been hijacked by the Evangelical Christian Right and Tea Party.  A founding principle of this country is the absolute separation between Church and State, something the far right wing in this country would like to change.  History clearly demonstrates that doesn’t work, anywhere.  Pandering to Christian fundamentalists is like funding Muslim extremists, the tact taken by our Saudi “allies”.   I don’t want to live under a government that requires us to be anywhere on the continuum between forcing a mother to have a child she doesn’t want and stoning a woman to death for infidelity.   Is it lost on everyone but me that the poorest, fattest and least educated states in this country are the spiritual epicenter of these hypocritical Christian bigots?  Sound familiar Afghanistan?

Not to mention that the Republicans stranded us in Afghanistan after necessarily striking there following 9/11, and took us to war in Iraq on false pretenses; resulting in the loss of thousands of American lives and destabilization of the whole world.  I much prefer Obama’s strategy of hunting down and killing with minimal collateral damage the actual terrorists who threaten our country.   And although I am about as far from a Socialist as you can get, unfettered Capitalism as currently preached by Romney doesn’t work either.  Greed inevitably gets in the way, and a small minority reaps enormous profits off the suffering of the majority.  Witness the fucked up mess Obama inherited from Bush.

As for the Tea Party, give me a break.  Anyone who has run a company, never mind a country, knows complex problems are only solved by intelligent people working together to forge solutions that are invariably rooted in compromises taking into account the diverse needs and best interests of all the stakeholders.   Today’s partisan politics, spearheaded by the Tea Party, allow for no such solutions on the complex issues that threaten our society like immigration, global competition, health care for an aging population, the environment, energy and over-population.  So this Bandito is voting for Obama, reluctantly.

Babe and I spent my 60th birthday, September 10th (the last normal day), with my parents in Seattle.  I thanked them for having me and learned that my birth had only cost them $150.   Talk about the deal of the century!  My Dad was in the Air Force at the time and had just flown 52 bombing missions in a B-29 over Korea which is why they got such a great price.  Babe completely stunned me two days later with a surprise birthday in Ashland where we stopped briefly to drop off our camping gear and rented Ford Explorer.  I was completely floored. It brought tears to my eyes when I answered the door and my parents walked in having driven down the day before from Seattle.   It was a great night with many of our good friends who took the time to come party with us on a Wednesday night. Thank you!

Life is risky

Sixty is enough of a milestone to make me pause and reflect on my life.  My attitude toward it is best summed up by the following Chinese proverb:

Life is risky; we are all acrobats
Tiptoeing over one bridge or another
To a tightrope walker
The rope is just like home
Having lived life at full tilt, I could die today with little regret despite my countless and continuing mistakes.  I’ve learned, to my chagrin, that mistakes are an inevitable consequence of being human; not making them means not trying.   But the most important thing I have learned is how lucky I am to be alive: an incredible gift.  Life is so short and I feel blessed every day to experience the miracle and diversity of it.  The older I get the more I value my relationships with other people.  With age has come the ability to look beyond most of my prejudices, and I am invariably amazed by the special talent that virtually every person possesses whenever I take the time to get to know them.  That doesn’t mean that I suffer fools gladly.

F-18 showing off

The other major thing I’ve learned is that most of the crap that bothered me over the years just didn’t matter in the long run.  The older I get the less I seem to need.  Happiness comes from hanging out with friends, solving the puzzle of a rock face, standing in a stream with a fishing pole in hand, hauling ass down snow covered slopes, surfing a wave in my kayak on a pristine river, and having sex with my lascivious wife.  Life has become a pursuit of the unexpected while learning to cherish simple pleasures.

"I'll take one of these please"

Reno has a desperate feeling to it.   The streets are empty.  Those we encounter at our hotel the Silver Legacy are invariably old, out of shape and sallow.  Not the most vital of us for sure.  There is a whitewater park running through the center of town that is quite nice which I hope to visit next spring, but Reno is a town that is down on its luck.

Cockpit of vintage Stearman

The air races, on the other hand, are fabulous.  While standing in line for the toilet I encounter a one-armed man smoking a cigar.   He lost his arm at these same races last year when one of the racers lost control and crashed into the crowd, killing 11 and severely wounding 58 others.  I talk with another guy who served as an EMT at that disaster.  It shook him to the core and required extensive time away from his job to begin healing.  Neither of them would think of being anywhere else a year later other than watching highly modified planes scream around pylons on edge at 500 mph, 50 feet off the ground.

Sitting in the vintage Stearman

Babe and I both delight at the beautiful vintage planes and state-of-the-art military jets (F-18’s & F-22’s).  The aerobatic performers and precision air teams all rock, and the awesome power and noise of an F-18 screaming down the runway a few feet off the ground at mach .94 brings a shout of pure joy.  Watching one of the aerobatic pilots flutter upside down to the ground with his engine purposely shut down floods me with memories of my own near misses including an engine failure in my Cessna T-210 when I was 9,000 feet over Rochester, NY.  Good stuff, especially when you live through it.

Sitting on this plane, however, is getting old.  I will be glad when we land in Barcelona in a few hours.