over the time of his residence. Common and Joni also sent their children to nearly all-black schools. When they were five or six, they self-identified as black. For them racial identity was not a skin tone; it was who all their friends were.
Rice’s sociology department has a fund of money for research that it splits up equally among the faculty each year. Common, who already had a tenured chair, gave his money to junior faculty, figuring they would need it more in order to get tenure. He eventually left his chair at Rice to go to work at North Park University in Chicago. He gave up a prestigious job at a prestigious school for a job at an obscure school because he thought the students at North Park could be served in different ways than the students at Rice.
Endean told me about Common several years ago, but he stays in the mind, a vision of a person who has found a total commitment, and an example of the way a vocation, when lived out to the fullest, connects all things, comes together in one coherent package, overshadows the self, and serves some central good.
PART III
Marriage
FOURTEEN
The Maximum Marriage
Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925. He failed out of high school, worked manual jobs, and bummed around Europe before establishing himself as a poet and teacher. Much of his writing was about love, and especially his love for his wife, Michiko Nogami, twenty-one years his junior. Michiko died of cancer at thirty-six. Shortly after her death he wrote a poem called “Married”:
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
I begin a chapter on marriage with a poem about death because marriage defies anecdote and sometimes is felt most powerfully after it has gone. A beautiful marriage is not dramatic. It is hard to depict in novel and song because the acts that define it are so small, constant, and particular. Marriage is knowing she likes to get to the airport early. Marriage is taking the time to make the bed even though you know that if you didn’t do it she probably would. At the grand level, marriage means offering love, respect, and safety, but day to day, there are never-ending small gestures of tact and consideration, in which you show you understand her moods, you cherish his presence, that this other person is the center of your world. At the end of the day there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage, giving up part of yourself, the desires you have, for the larger union.
Marriage is the ups and downs. There are private jokes, retelling the stories about the sacred places where love was born, hearing his familiar anecdotes at dinner parties, and, inevitably, endless planning.
That passage from Corinthians that everybody reads at weddings really does define marital love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything in it. George Washington had a rather interesting life, but still concluded, “I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life, the foundation of happiness or misery.”
I have a friend who married a beautiful and talented woman about his own age. Seven years later, after a season of infertility troubles, they had a child, but something went wrong in the delivery room. His wife had an amniotic fluid embolism and lost an immense amount of blood. At the height of the crisis, the doctors told him she might well die—50 to 80 percent of mothers with the condition do. If she lived, it was extremely likely that she would have severe and permanent brain damage. My friend sat there in the waiting room coming to terms with the fact that the rest of his life might be