Needle in a Haystack

Recently, in response to one of my blog posts called "Searching For Home"—about trying to find the place you used to live by scouring Google Earth—a friend of mine asked me to help her find the place she had lived when we first met each other back in the 80s. To aid in the search, she had one landmark, a hotel, that she knew she could walk to from her place, but other than that, it was a total blank. To be fair, it has been a looooong time, and it was before she could drive, which is when most people's sense of geography and navigation truly kicks in. Actually, there was one other landmark she could remember, a soccer field, but it had disappeared from the area, probably long since turned into houses or businesses. So she sent me this map, and three other pictures of herself, her sister, and a friend at their house, and then tried to describe some of the idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood.

She thought the road was an off-shoot with no official name, and that the mail carrier always had to have hand-written instructions on the envelopes to get them to her house. It was as if none of the houses on the road had working addresses or something. The pictures she had were obviously intended to capture memories of her with her sister and friend together, not to document the house or the neighborhood itself (because who would do that?). There was a lot of ground to cover in the map, especially one click-and-drag up and down Google Street View at a time, and precious little to go on.

So I put on my detective hat, and started looking at all of the details in the background of the photos, trying to find ways to narrow the search and eliminate the dozens of houses and apartment complexes in an area completely unfamiliar to me. Her place was a two-story duplex, and I could see from a sliver of background that it backed up to an apartment complex that was at least three stories, and might also have been a mauve/pink color. Across the street and up the block from her house there was another two-story place, and maybe that balcony on that place—just in the periphery of the shot—was built in an unusual architectural style? The place next door may or may not have a corner-entrance to the building? Her driveway was abrupt and sloped down, and the front entry was a double-door with an interesting inlay. It was within walking distance (for a 15 year old) of a particular landmark that still existed.

I flew over the neighborhood in Google Maps, with the 3-D feature enabled so I could see where the two and three story places were in relation to each other. I looked at the color of the buildings, old neighborhood features that she would likely have remembered had she been adjacent to them. Anything to exclude entire blocks at a time. I decided that even though she didn’t remember much, she probably would have remembered living by an ancient archeological dig. She certainly would have remembered living by a huge canal that ran out to the sea. I mean, I know I’d have had some adventures over there at that age if it was a feature in my neighborhood. I had to believe that she or her friends would have, too. Since she didn’t have any memory of those things, she probably didn’t live on that side of the main drag. So I jumped over to the neighborhood on the east side. There looked to be a new-ish school in the area. Maybe that’s where the soccer field had disappeared to?

So I dropped into Street View and roamed up and down a few streets fairly near the school, basing it on mutli-story buildings and that mauve/pink place that I thought might have stayed mauve/pink, lo these many years. That's a bold choice, and people that commit to a decision like that might be tenacious about it. Found a couple of places that seemed possible, almost but not quite. Looked almost the same, but the building behind it wasn’t three stories. Or the facing street seemed too wide. Even though the street in her pictures was barely visible in a sliver of background, and out of focus, it still seemed pretty narrow and cramped somehow. Since there was barely anything to go on, I decided to trust my gut impressions of what was and wasn’t in the photo, and kept moving if the spot I was at didn’t feel right.

I went past the real place twice before I realized I’d actually found it. I initially rejected it as similar, but not the same. Then I realized that it had probably been given a facelift in the past 30+ years. So if I mentally subtracted an awning running across the front of the building, the brick pillars supporting that awning, and altered the color in my mind’s eye from the mustard yellow it is now back to the fabulous 80’s-Mall color-motif it sported back in the day, it became clear I’d actually found it.

So I zoomed in, took some screen shots, and then did some side-by-side comparisons with my friend’s photos. For all that had changed (new paint, new doors and windows, new fence, new roof awning and brick posts), there were still enough features that were identical (placement of handrails and light fixtures, step-downs in the dividing wall between the duplex units, double-panel entry doors with that unique inlay) to eliminate any doubt. I’d for sure found it. My friend and her dad have since confirmed. And by the way, she was right. Google only records four working addresses for the dozen houses on that narrow street.

Now the kicker here is that not only have I never been to this house that she moved out of over 30 years ago, not only was their virtually zero information to go on, not only were the photos I was working with—that live in a shoebox in the attic—originally taken on an 80's instamatic that she then shot with her phone and messaged to me, not only have all the landmarks changed and the exterior been noticeably remodeled over the past three-plus decades, but it’s in… Naples, Italy!

That does it, I’m cashing it in on the whole construction racket and hanging out my shingle as a PI.

A Culture of Two

We’re standing at the sink together when she gives with the little growl that generally lets me know that I’m being annoying. The funny thing is, I can tell by the growl that I’m being annoying in a specific way. There are several variations to the growl, nuances of timbre, volume, and aggression that communicate specific things. There are ones that are preemptory, warning me not to proceed with a given enterprise; others communicate “What fresh hell is this?” However, this particular one is reserved for the kind of misdemeanors I commit repeatedly, which she finds annoying but knows will never change, if they haven’t in the 18 years we’ve been married.

I look over to see what infraction I’ve been convicted of, and see that she is rinsing out something that I had previously loaded into the dishwasher. This is a source of some comedic friction between us, the competition of who is best at loading the dishwasher and, as a subset of that contest, which techniques of preparation and loading are actually necessary to get a load of dishes clean. I have been grudgingly forced to admit over the years that she has better top shelf technique, but maintain that I am the Shao-Lin master of the bottom rack. In any event, that old roll around dishwasher may seem like a piece of 1950’s technology, but it’s motor sounds like a jet engine that McDonald-Douglas would be proud of, and it can blast the paint off dishes. There is absolutely no need to rinse any dishes, so I don’t. Lindsay doesn’t see it that way, so when I see her rinsing out the glass of orange juice I respond to her subvocal growl with a practiced eye roll and chuckle. It occurs to me that a whole drama has played out in a moment’s time, representing years of discussions and arguments, without a word ever being spoken.

Which gets me to thinking about how anyone else in the world would have perceived these events, had they been a fly on the wall. A low growl from her, and I instantly break up in laughter? We’d look crazy to just about anyone. They say that 90% of communication is nonverbal, but around here that’s a little on the low side. The kind of reductive shorthand that you develop in a marriage is hard to describe, beyond the generic fact of it. A look, a word, a gesture can be emblematic of thousands of words, dozens of hours of bickering or rambling late-night discussions. Some are hilarious, inside jokes and private narratives, while still others are outliers marking the edges of a minefield of unsettled disagreements and lingering emotions, best left untrodden. This emotional slang is the hallmark of a unique culture. A culture of two.

A culture is, essentially, the shared memories of a group. These memories manifest as traditions and
taboos, values and mores, as well as affected behaviors and communication. In the macro, it looks like the emphasis a culture places on different values, like education and work ethic, or different kinds of communal holidays and celebrations, incorporating classes of jargon and slang. The smaller the group, the more specialized their cultural traits; the jargon used on a construction site differs vastly from that used in the halls of an attorney’s office. The same is true in microcosm of a marriage.

We’ve evolved an argot that would be unrecognizable to anyone outside of we two. A series of catcalls, nicknames, tidbits of movie dialogue, gestures and facial expressions that, if recorded, would be as strange as anything Diane Fossey found cohabitating with those gorillas in the mist. For example, we literally never use each other’s names at home. Ever. My wife is the person in the world who uses my given name the least. One memorable exception came about a dozen years ago on a nice spring evening, I was just stepping into the shower and Lindsay called my name from the living room. By her tone, and the fact that she even used my name, I knew it was an emergency, so I tore out of the bathroom and down the hall, naked as the day I was born, half expecting to have to confront an intruder in the buff. Turns out we’d started a fire with an unattended candle, which is only slightly better to a naked person, believe me.

There are some rules in this culture of course, most of which we set down while we were dating, before we were even engaged, refining and adding to the lexicon as we’ve built our lives together. The Golden Rule is this: no making fun of the other. No put-downs, no name calling, no zingers, no sarcastic asides. There are plenty of things to laugh at in the world, and other people to make fun of; neither of us is fair game. Another basic tenet is that we rarely ever have a conversation in anger, preferring silence in a heated moment and rational discussion after the fact. That can be a tough one, but it’s lead to way more harmony over the years.

For as much as we’ve planned in our lives, other things have evolved outside of any intentions. Like the way the walk together, never hand in hand but arm in arm. The second she links her arm to mine, I change my stride and lock step with her, sometimes with a little hop to land on the same foot she’s leading with –left, right, left- quite unconsciously, so that we move together in sync. Or the division of labor, who could have guessed that I would wind up the decorator and she the tree-trimmer?

It’s the little things like that which define your culture. The nicknames and the inside jokes are all a way of taking ownership and personalizing your intertwining lives. And the more we do this and grow together, the more I realize that our life amongst friends, family, and coworkers out in the everyday world casts into specific relief the unique inner life that exists between us, like a secret history.

We took a professionally administered personality test once, with a group from a church we helped to build. The test was designed to assess your personality in both public and private settings, so as to find the best place for a person to work in a group. Both Lindsay and I scored so unusually that they had us take the test again. It turns out that the disparity between our public and private personas is so vast that it threw the whole test parameter out of whack. It was like Clark Kent/Superman different, like we had secret identities. As I’ve thought of that over the years it occurs to me that that is exactly right. When we are in public, Lindsay is demure and reserved while I’m assertive and ebullient. At home, however, the dynamic is completely reversed. I become quiet, pensive, even philosophical, while Lindsay becomes a complete maniac.

No one believes me when I say this, any more than anyone believes that mild mannered Clark Kent is actually Superman. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the dancing, the ambushes, the karate chops, the catcalls and chases that run from one end of the house to the other, but to no avail. No one knows this version of her but me. The version that is stubborn as a mule, but patient as the day is long. The one who can balance a checkbook to the cent, and in the next moment get jiggy when Uptown Funk or Can’t Fight the Feeling comes on. And she’s got the moves, believe me.

Of course she knows me equally well, in some ways better than I know myself. Over the past several years she’s surprised even me by being able to predict what I’m upset about when I let out a particular “awwww” in relation to something that I’m reading. There is an “awwww” that means an animal has been injured or killed; an “awwww” that means someone I admire has died; an “awwww” that means something truly awful has happened to us on a personal level. Even I can’t say what the difference is, but she can.

Sometimes I wish that other people knew the person I know, instead of just the facet that is shown to the public and our friends and family. There have been those in my life who wondered why I would pick someone so unassuming to marry, and I can never fully explain to them that I didn’t marry the mild mannered alter ego, but the superhero. Most days though, I’m content to just keep that under my hat. It’s alright with me if this world is just us two.

Happy 18th Birthday to our Marriage.