“A Skeptic’s Guide to Relationship Science” by Dick WestheimerPosted by Rattle
Dick Westheimer
A SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO RELATIONSHIP SCIENCE
Deb and I lay in bed last night skin to skin. I think my hand was on her thigh and hers caressed my chin, maybe thumbed my earlobe like she sometimes does. We talked, again, about “love languages,” how she likes to give little treasures and wants me to be more attentive to her lists. Like today, her cellphone wouldn’t sync. She needs help with it. She reminds me I still haven’t hung Jeff’s picture in the rec-room. I know Deb’s notebook is full of to-dos for me, all dated, some starred in red pen. There are too few checked off. I tap my fingertips, one by one, feather-light on the small of her back. She sighs.
I love
her touch
typing
Today I read to Deb from a new study. “Love Languages,” it says, “are not supported by empirical data.” (One of my Love Languages must be “empirical data.”) She tells me about a conversation she had with our friend Claire. They were walking along Barton Pond in Ann Arbor. Deb recalls wearing new blue walking shoes, the ones she now dons to work in the garden. It must have been thirty years ago, she says. Claire’s man Paul hadn’t read the Love Languages book either.
growing old
we remember
different things
I always wake later than Deb. This morning I find a note taped to my computer keyboard: “Kitchen Counter,” it read, written in aqua-marine script. I’d left the remains of my dinner fixings and now they stuck like glue to the old Formica. We often prepare and eat different meals—mine always with brown rice and beans and cooked greens, Deb’s according to her mood. On the table where I sit to eat there’s a note rubber-banded to the tamari bottle: “PLEASE, Return Me To The Shelf” it reads in bold black marker. As I clean the counter, Deb squeezes by. Her bottom brushes mine, comfortably, for sure.
Dick Westheimer: “The headline, ‘Fans shrug off study debunking love languages,’ was catnip for me. My wife was an early reader of Gary Chapman’s best seller and a believer, and more than occasionally speaks of our differences as measured by the ‘love languages’ construct. Of course I had to read the study! (She might say that referring to ‘studies’ is one of my love languages.) And, of course we both know after 44 years of what Pastor Chapman would call ‘incompatible’ love languages that they are not predictive of a long-sustaining relationship—like the study shows.” (web)
David M. deLeon: “I don’t know anyone named Sally. Yet there she is in more than one poem, not doing anything but listening to me while I throw things together, trying to cobble up some sort of ladder to see out with. And I keep apologizing to her, over and over, because she knows me well enough. Everything’s magic but the magician.” (web)
Al Ortolani: “Lately, whenever I invoke the Muse for inspiration, she gives me poems from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Way back to childhood. Even if I don’t want to go in this direction, since the past is the past, old hat as they say, I know that rejecting the Muse can end up in something like poetic impotence. So I follow her lead, and dig around through images I should have sold at garage sales. Probably, there’s a lesson here about knowing thyself, remembering and learning, even when you’ve tried to forget.” (web)
Image: “Cold Sun” by Jeanne Wilkinson. “Watch This!” was written by Tristan Roth for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
__________
Tristan Roth
WATCH THIS!
You captured the whole thing on the flippy-est dumb phone,
before you got smart. Fourteen felt like the un-freest zone
of youth: can’t drive, can’t drink, can’t rub two nickels,
can’t march to the beat of your harmonious own.
That winter of fourteen, you three trudged through snow,
pushing a Safeway shopping cart up the bunniest slope,
where the interstate goes under the canyon road. With temps
in the teens, you played Rochambeau, with the runniest nose.
Chomping at the bit, Jake always threw rock.
You always threw scissors. You were the cunningest one.
But Tristan was a lame-o poet, who lived life on paper.
“Me?” he said, voice squeaking in the jumpiest tone.
You were complete dicks back then, scared shitless of being
called chicken, charlatans strutting around the unknown,
your cockscombs uncolored by the foghorned winter sun.
Jake did a DX crotch chop. You were the scummiest clone,
You said Suck it! like Triple H and called him a pussy.
You mocked him like girls with your honey-est moans.
He climbed in, then dropped, the doppler sound of his voice.
“Watch this!” Tristan said, before breaking his funniest bone.
Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly: “There are so many elements of ‘Watch This!’ that I enjoyed, admired, and was moved by. The voice feels true to the way teenagers actually think and speak, and this is reinforced by the repetition of creative ‘-est’ words throughout the poem: ‘the flippy-est dumb phone,’ ‘the un-freest zone.’ I had to read some of the phrases a few times because they were so unexpected and satisfying: ‘cockscombs uncolored by the foghorned winter sun.’ The scene works well placed into Jeanne Wilkinson’s bleak, evocative image–one can imagine a trio of directionless teenage boys, riddled with hidden insecurities and secret fears, scattered across Wilkinson’s desolate winter landscape, ‘pushing a Safeway shopping cart up the bunniest slope.’ And finally, there’s the encompassing fact that this is simply a gorgeous poem. It’s no small feat to write a ghazal that flows naturally and feels entirely authentic (believe me, I’ve tried), and Tristan Roth makes it look easy.”
Laren McClung: “Lately I’ve been reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. She was part of a movement called Acmeism, which formed as a reaction against symbolism. The movement was concerned with poetry that moves through the use of association. Association opens ways between worlds, like the intersection of consciousness and subconsciousness, how one sound or image or thought conjures another entirely unrelated, like montage, like dreaming.”
Rachel Mallalieu: “As an emergency physician, I am forever hoping for things to go back to ‘the way they were.’ The pandemic, however, exposed and exacerbated longstanding issues such as emergency room boarding and the lack of a medical safety net for many. Now we are also severely understaffed. Many days, we do not have the nurses and techs needed to safely staff an ER. Medical staff is burning out at alarming rates and patients are suffering. I don’t know the answer, but something has to give.” (web)