HARDWIRED

HARDWIRED

For the electronically challenged:  join the group.

hard-wire (härd w r )

tr.v. hard-wired, hard-wir·ing, hard-wires

1. To connect (electronic components, for example) by electrical wires or cables.

2. To implement (a capability) through logic circuitry that is permanently connected within a computer and therefore not subject to change by programming.

3. To determine or put into effect by physiological or neurological mechanisms; make automatic or innate: "It may be that certain orders of anxiety are hard-wired in us" (Armand Schwerner).

There is this cleaving thing going on. (Gen 2:24).

Don and I will be married 42 years this summer.  Believe me, that is a miracle.  You probably couldn't find two different marriage partners in a dream.  

When I first visited Don's home and saw his room, I could probably have run.  He was building stereos from kits they had back then.  Wires and unidentifiable electronic parts everywhere littered the room. Dust was two inches thick beneath- his mother had been warned not to touch anything.  A half glass of orange juice on the dressers about all I recognized, and a vitamin pill his mother had left there.  Several, as a matter of fact. They had been there for years, no doubt about it.

I was on the market for a stereo.  Someone told me he had a friend who built them and would probably sell one cheap.  So, that was the beginning.  The stereo was great.  And the guy who sold it to me was just offbeat enough to be really interesting in the inimitable 60s kind of way.

We did have important things in common:  Music, Methodist Church, German ancestors (me, Plat Deutsch, he, Haut Deutsch his parents reminded me often. We both have a fair amount of intelligence though of completely different stripes.  Me, the arts, language and literature, education.  He, math, science, and no love lost for formal education. (My parents, both teachers from generations of teachers, reminded me often that he had not finished college and to get a degree he would have to attend night school.) Our relationship with each others' parents is another story entirely, and one that can hardly be told with any great degree of charity.  We'll leave it at that.

So hardwired we are after 42 years of marriage.  I like simplicity: if the darn thing works, that's all I care about.  This goes for anything, but especially electronic gadgets from appliances to electronic tech stuff.  See, I told you.  Stuff is what I call these things that hang out in every room of my house.  Stuff.  I either don't know what they are called, or I just don't give a tinker's damn what they are called.

The big clue about what I was in for in this marriage.  I was in the hospital in labor.  They hooked me up to a Hewlett Packard fetal monitor.  Don has done the research, knew the specs for this machine backwards and forwards.  Well into my Pitocen induced labor I had a mammoth breathtaking contraction. D looked at the monitor screen at the peaks and valleys of pain pictured there and said, oh that wasn't so bad.  Machines are sacrosanct, you see, in D's world. The nurse came in and saw that I was doing that Lamaze stage four breathing and said, Oh dear! The monitor has slipped.  We're not getting an accurate reading! So much for the god blessed machine you fool, I yelled at the baby's father in my pain glazed state. If he hadn't looked so ridiculous in his rumpled green surgical cap with the strings hanging down, I might have murdered him on the spot.

Stereo systems were installed in our apartment and then the ramshackle house we bought where everything, and I mean everything, had to be done.  It was really a knockdown candidate.  First things first, D set to installing stereo equipment, as he began a rebuild that went on for decades on the dump we had purchased. Saving grace?  It had a fireplace and it came with an acre and a half of land.  Farm girl here saw only the land.  Lord, was I blind.

I must say the place is lovely, though needing upgrades in almost every room. But NOT the electronics!  Big screen TV, three computers, all connected to Apple for films, family picture shows.  Surround sound system and at least 5 speakers in the greatroom.

Oh, the Rogers organ that came with the marriage debt and all.  It has been chopped and merged with a draw knob organ D got for free from a college looking to replace it with an Allen.  An ALLEN!, D. sniffs. Chop off the donation organ, graft it onto the original Rodgers, all meticulously done and filling the small den. Now the Rogers is a three manual, draw knob, digitalized by Ahlborn instruments with 95 equivalent ranks that literally could blow the roof off the house.  Speakers are everywhere badly cohabitating with the decor- from a four foot cabinet which just barely passes for a credenza, speakers in every corner, in the ceiling and wires everywhere  scandalously undressed in full view.  A veritable booby trap of black snakes.  Walk through at your own risk! The thing puts out a cathedral of sound. I pass the plate at dinner parties.  Babies cry.

All this, I have ceased complaining about. The angst hurts me and doesn't touch the intended recipient one whit.

D has a condition I call "The Navaho Syndrome".  The Navahos left small flaws or openings in their woven rugs to let out the evil spirits that may reside there.  That's Don. Navaho undone places in every project he's ever done.  And there are many.  A piece of missing molding here, a hole in the wall where the saw missed 15 years ago, a boat unsold in the back yard when the new one was delivered and now monopolizes all other projects needing to be done.  Lights in the backyard with bulbs burned out, lighting wires needing replacement, mail all over my dining room table.

But new hardwood floors, gorgeous radiator covers, and every tech item a person could want and then some.  Thousands of downloaded albums play on surround sound while all the family pictures scroll by on the big screen.

Adolf, we call our German-made dishwasher,  needs an engineer to operate. Oh yeah. Every object D owns has a name; they are family members as far as D is concerned.  D is an aerospace engineer.  Everything we buy has to be complicated enough to fly. The little toaster oven I wanted came home the most ridiculously technologically complicated and model made. Turned out to need a two week training course to operate.  

When I mention the Navahos all over the house, the good projects (of which admittedly there are quite a few) are loudly enumerated.  Whether 30 years or more back. And loudly, believe me.  Red splotches all over his neck mean take cover.

In truth, along with finishing his degree, sharing all duties involved in having a new baby, Don literally built this house. Except for the shell of the upstairs addition and the greatroom.  And having paid 50 thousand for the house in 1975, having only enough money to eat tuna noodle casserole,  it is worth over, well, a lot more.  So just shut up and maybe he'll go first.  On second thought, I'd have to deal with the remains of a thousand projects, AND the Navahos.

Gardening, painting, original needlework, church, reading, writing, philosophy, animal and human rights.  A neat house. Clean up, and throw out junk at every opportunity.  Oh, I forgot to mention a big item. I've always had my own back account.  That's me.

Electronics, boats, cars, guns, music and many gadgets on which to listen to it, tools for every possible eventuality from tile cutters, to nailers, to socket sets that can be used in every country on the globe and all ancillary equipment for same. Projects begun, Navaho totems included, and always more projects.  Forget about the junk, keep all of it- you may need it in 50 years.  He has old pants up in his closet with a paint color on them we used in 1975.  But babies and animals love him to pieces. That's Don. 

He's conservative; I'm a liberal.  Hawk and dove. Amazingly we are friends,  good friends. It's a hardwire situation, this marriage.  It's a certain unexpectedly comfortable order that is innate, hardwired in.  A bit of a miracle, really.