It was 29 years ago today that my wife and I tied the metaphorical knot. Suzanne has been with me ever since (or perhaps I could say I’ve been with her), through good times and bad, and we love each other more now than ever before.
People ask me for the secret to our long and happy marriage, and there’s no single answer to that… but the one factor I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the fact that we’re not in each other’s faces all the time. We are individuals and we share some but not all interests; we respect the parts of each other’s lives in which we personally have and desire less involvement, and acknowledge their value without having to be immersed in them.
Folks at the Mountain Skies festival a couple of weeks ago were quite surprised that Suzanne never showed up at the venue, and that they had to go find her at a nearby café to say hello. That’s not news—she’s not a fan of ambient music at all, and never has been. She’d never been to Asheville and was curious, and she did enjoy an afternoon or two of hanging with a couple of the other musos’ plus-ones, but she was never going to hang out and listen to me play, and I was fine with that.
The idea of willingly giving one another space as an ingredient for a happy partnership isn’t new. Hundreds of years ago, Jewish philosophers noted that a solid block of wood was hard to light on fire, but wood with spaces in between would burn long and well. There’s a Rush song that focuses on that idea (“Entre Nous”), and recently a Facebook friend was surprised and delighted when his wife made that same observation as they sat beside a fire together.
Tonight on Meander, I celebrate over 31 years of love and precisely 29 years of marriage to the woman of my dreams. Please join me for two “anniversary” longplayers by my friends Jim Combs and Robert Dorschel in the first hour of the show… and in the second, I premiere a one-hour-long improvisation I captured in the studio a couple of days ago, a song I’ve entitled “The Space Between The Embers.” I hope you all can join me on radiospiral.net or at our booth at the Sci Fi Con in Second Life, for a quiet celebration of the relationship that makes me as good as I am today. As per usual, we start at 8/7/6/5 PM.
Oh, and speaking of Second Life: I have not one but two more shows on the Sci Fi Con main stage coming up! To reach a wider European audience, I will be performing early in the (US) morning on Tuesday the 21st (tomorrow) and Thursday the 23rd. The shows will be simulcast on RadioSpiral and will feature themes from “Embers,” a couple of other new tracks I’m developing, and lots more spontaneous sound creation and improvisation. I will try to remember to send out notices before each show, but note the times now and join me if you can.
