Preface to "After the Paint Dries: A Love Story"

no strangers to disagreements nor hard feelings

Preface

I have known Beverly Lane for over fifty years and have been married to her for thirty-eight of them which is sort of unheard of these days. And we have experimented with all kinds of art forms beginning with my fiction and poetry, book reviews and painting, photography and especially nude art. My wife became my model naturally, as she has always been my muse. Nothing I produce is absent Beverly. She is present in all my work. 

But it hasn’t been easy, this life. We both made poor decisions early on and have suffered with the consequences all our lives together. And then natural aging happened, death and disease, and life somehow took the wheel and lived us instead of we living it. It is hoped by our rambling on in the pages to follow that this idea of a love story will prove to make better sense. Our method to getting to our truths is for us to both talk this out until there is nothing left to say. And if you are reading this preface now it means we succeeded, in a large way, in making our story not only interesting but palatable.      

We both know that anyone designating any literary endeavor a love story can often sound a bit corny, fabricated even, and perhaps too much of a good thing. What makes our accounting different is the format. Having been recently introduced to the essays of Fleda Brown, and especially the collaboration between her and fellow poet laureate Sydney Lea in their book Growing Old in Poetry, it occurred to me that my wife and I could use the same format they did. One of us would start a topic, title it, and then the other would respond. A bit of back and forth should precipitate a lively conversation, and our prospective and rambling narrative might engage a higher gear. We both are not strangers to disagreements nor hard feelings. Due to our lifelong incendiary, but very loving relationship, there is little doubt that a few fireworks will be set off. It hasn’t all been a celebration. But we both think our situation is more unique than the typical conventional marriage, and this exercise is designed as more of an examination of our personal lives beginning as children and proceeding into our relationship now spanning over fifty years. We have been married for over forty of them and still wish to add many more. 

Beverly and I were star-crossed lovers from the very beginning. There were elements in her strict Lutheran upbringing that frowned on us getting together in the first place. My family attended a different Lutheran Church than her family, a different synod, and therefore conflicting ideas about serving God or how to conduct oneself in this sinful world. The fact that both sides had strong Finnish blood might have also contributed to this bigotry as well.

The next segment #1: "After the Paint Dries: A Love Story" can be read here.

—"After the Paint Dries: A Love Story" is a rather long memoir that is being serialized before finding its way into a book. Each entry will be a segment lifted from each subtitled piece of a back-and-forth dialogue impatiently at rest among the whole shebang.