While I was warming up from a walk in the cold, I watched CBS This Morning. The hosts were interviewing Oona Metz, a therapist who’d written Unhitched: an Essential Guide to Divorce. “Divorce is painful at first, but women who divorce find themselves transformed. Women are throwing over thirty, forty-year marriages.” Another time they discussed Strangers, a memoir about marriage heartbreak. CBS gave them ample airtime.
CBS promoting a practice that breaks hearts and spins families apart left me empty wishing I could watch a story about the transformation that long marriages can bring.
Then I opened Substack to Sherman Alexie love poems. (Sherman Alexie is the author of the classic The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the writer/director of The Business of Fancy Dancing.) Here’s part of one called To Be Continued:
“Listen, Listen. Most people
Still want to get married. Most people still want
to have children. We humans are not so different
than hummingbirds and brown bears. I’d often dreamed
of being a groom during my childhood. And now
look at me sharing this house—sharing all these
rooms with my wife and sons. I want my descendants,
the grandchildren of my grandchildren, to study
the old photographs of my face and see their eyes
and nose and hair. I want them to hang family portraits
in their homes and say, “That one there with the big chin,
he’s the tall Indian who loved to write poems.”
I’m Katie Andraski with Sherman Alexie and that’s my perspective.
