Copyright © 1998 David C. Hay
IX. Epilogue
On Monday, I
had to go back to work, as though life was normal. I'm sorry, but after the two
months I had just spent, life wasn't normal. My whole world had been turned
upside down by the things I had seen and experienced.
Meanwhile my
And then
there was this girl . . . I couldn't get her out of my mind. I went into a
major funk for most of the Autumn. I developed the pictures I had taken in
My Dream . . .
I got a
chance to go back to
"Well,
you could marry her," he said.
Marry?! We’d
only known each other for a couple of weeks. And she lives in
But then I
went home and went back into my funk. About a month later I was writing a long
chain-of-consciousness letter to a friend in
So I called
her up and proposed. We were married in June.
It was an
interesting sensation, being in the frame of mind that says: "You know?
The absolutely most logical, most reasonable thing for me to do with my life
right now would be to take a month's salary, go to the opposite side of the
planet, and marry a girl I've known for three weeks. I mean, what else can I
do? I certainly can't live without her."
It was also
interesting to be able to witness a Polish wedding – until I realized that I
was the groom!
The Bride and Groom
Of course it
wasn't until she came to
To anyone
considering marrying someone you've only known for three weeks, I can only
recommend that you pick someone from a completely different culture that you
know nothing about. You will never be bored with each other. Her reaction to everything
was completely the opposite of what I expected. Not only was she not like me,
she wasn't anything like anyone I had ever known. The things she liked. The
things she didn't like.
Ok, ok,
maybe I was not exactly what she expected, either. I turned out to be a
university employee with very little money, living in
And the
The
A couple of
years into the marriage, I was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in
I said to
him that, you know, it's really challenging to be married to someone whose
upbringing, experiences and way of looking at things are completely different
from my own.
He sighed
and said, yes, he knew exactly what I meant.
He had
married a girl from upstate
As it
happens, the differences between Jola and me have simply made life with her
more exciting. She has made me check every assumption I've ever made about life
– with the effect that I have learned a tremendous amount about both the world
and myself in the process. Marriage doesn't get more exciting.
And we do
seem to have found something in common. A lot of those things we see
differently that I thought were so important – turn out not to be that
important after all. Below the surface is the common chord that we both must
have recognized when first we met. We've been married for twenty-five years
now, raising two children from diapers to college, living everywhere from that
crummy New York apartment to a nice house in Houston – and we have never
disagreed on anything important.
It looks as
though this marriage thing may actually work.
It's still
hard to believe that the person I couldn't imagine even speaking to is the one
who greets me with a smile now when I come home from work. Indeed, she has
turned out to be the very definition of that "home" I was looking
for.
And I'm
still crazy about her.
(And I find
it astounding for that long story to have led to this.)
In The Deluge, the second novel in Henryk
Sienkewicz's grand trilogy describing Envious ill-wishers -- and who doesn't have them? -- complained now and then that [Pan Andre] paid too much attention to his wife's advice. But he was the first to admit that he always listened carefully to everything that she had to say, because there was no mind like hers in the entire country, and no one else could give him such wise and thoughtful counsel. |