The marriage of true minds

[image: a set of Johanssen blocks]
"The marriage of true minds" Shakespeare refers to is a kind of perfect fit, like Johanssen blocks. There's that word again, perfect. I use it too loosely for an English major. Perfect day, etc. I get "being without defect or blemish" on various online dictionaries, all busy stealing from one another so that the quality of our knowledge keeps skidding downhill. Or so an article in the Times says. There's a logic there. But it is still spring here, daffodils on the kitchen table, and I don't care.

Perfect. Recently we watched a movie called "How to Cook Your Life," a documentary about Zen priest Ed Brown, who is a major cook in the world of Zen. The film had him giving dharma talks throughout ("dharma" being the way it is, how things are). In one section he talked about things with blemishes. He grew tearful talking about the humble beauty of the brass teapots in his first kitchen, how all dented up they waited on their shelf to serve. The filmmaker liked this, and did some nice lingering shots on a bunch of teakettles. (Which Ed thought are called teapots, but in the midwest we think, If you put it on a flame, it's a teakettle.) He said that to be sincere is to present yourself as you are, imperfect.

Well, I didn't mean to go there, but I can transition by saying I cleaned imperfectly this morning. Dusted under the king-size bed imperfectly - this requires getting down on the floor and then back up. I was thinking about how I can't let the roomba go under there and do this for me until Tom catches up the wires somehow. He's been meaning to do that for some weeks. So I thought about how to approach him on the subject. This is it, your relationships are a string of transactions, most of them small. That's an interesting thought.

The dust mop is high-tech, for a dustmop, a Libman. The head of it, which is removable, has become an even deep gray. I thought, Don't we have another head for this mop? I thought I remembered that Tom had bought the mop and two heads, and that I thought that was excessive. I hoped I didn't say anything, though sometimes my eyebrows speak volumes. I asked Tom about it. Yes, he said, he thought there was another head somewhere.

"Do you know where it might be?" I asked him.

"Maybe on the shelf of cleaning stuff in the garage."

And by God, it was. A nice clean brand new head for the mop. It was white!

I should save the story about the garage - for a marriage is very much about the attached garage - and just say I was so pleased. For it was me, it is I, who took some trouble not long ago to take everything out from under the sink (!), wash the shelf, and put back half the stuff. You know what under the sink gets to be like. The other half was stuff I don't reach under and use all the time, like leather cream for the recliner. Then I cleaned off a shelf in the garage, in which a mostly miscellaneous storage system is in place. Then I looked around to see if there was anything in the garage that should go on the shelf. I think you can see why I don't get much done on a given day.

As a result of all this organizing, I had created such excellent karma that the second mophead for the Libman was lying there in its package beside the extra filters for the roomba. That's the kind of people we are. It's pretty organized compared to the people Tom and I were when we met. Yet, we knew we were soul mates. We just didn't know that on a daily basis that was going to have to do with the dust mop.