Tag Archives: Marriage

The 1’s Have It

05 Wednesday Jan 2011

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Marriage

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The 1 Train, NYC Subway, January 5, 2011, Screen Shot. Donald Earl Collins

Every year that’s ended in “1” has been an interesting one for me, and I’m hoping that this year’s no different, at least in a positive way. The number 1 may be the loneliest number of all. But for me, the years that have ended in that number have been good, bad, ugly and complicated.

 

’71: I was a toddler, so only a few fragments of memory here. Still, my mom and my dad married that year, only to break up five years later and divorce in ’78. It was a good year, but it led to a lot of bad ones for my mother and father, and indirectly, for me and my older brother Darren.

’81: Now this is where things for me became really complicated. I started the year a straight-A student in sixth grade, finished second in a writing contest, managed to get into the Humanities Program, and had good friends. But becoming a Hebrew-Israelite and having a head the size of Jupiter with my early successes made the last four months of ’81 about as miserable for me as being naked in a blizzard. It took until ’89 to recover from all of the problems that started at home and at school that year.

’91: What a pivotal year! The year began with me having high hopes of getting into grad school, not knowing whether I’d be in Pittsburgh, DC, New York or even Berkeley in eight months. I hadn’t dated in so long that I figured I’d finished my master’s degree before I started going out again. But the year turned that May, between getting money to go to grad school at Pitt and me moving on from a brief crush on one of my best friends. I finally decided to start dating again, nearly a year before I finished my master’s. It turned out that this sense of hope and acting on hope was the theme for the rest of my decade.

’01: The hope and optimism that I took with me from the ’90s remained. Yet the pessimism of working in the real world and real world events would temper that youthful sense that everything I wanted in life was possible simply because I had the talent, faith and drive to make them all happen. Between working as assistant director for the New Voices Fellowship Program at AED and 9/11, though, I learned that so much in my and our lives was well beyond my control. And with that, that people can do me harm even when my only crime is being myself. That yin and yang reality shaped the stagnation that was this decade, with marriage, Noah and Fear of a “Black” America among the highlights of an up-and-down ten years.

What will ’11 bring? I honestly have no idea. The only thing I do know is that I can’t afford to sit back and wait for something good to happen. This much I learned in ’81, ’91, and ’01. As Morgan Freeman said in Shawshank Redemption, I need to “get busy living, or get busy dying. That’s g__damn right.”

Mistake No. 3 and Book #2

19 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage

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Culture Club, "Mistake No. 3" Single, November 19, 2010. Source: http://www.onlineauction.com

I’ve made many more than three mistakes in my walk as a writer. Mistake number three probably came around the same time Culture Club released “Mistake No. 3” off of their Waking Up with the House on Fire album in ’84. So many of them have come because I’ve either been impatient in making a decision or too tentative to make one at all.

Just with Boy @ The Window alone, I’ve probably made at least thirty-three mistakes. I should’ve started working on the book right after my conversation with my late teacher Harold Meltzer about my experiences, in February ’95. Even without Google, Facebook, MySpace, and so many other places to look, it would’ve been much easier to track down my ex-classmates and teachers. Instead, I single-mindedly pursued my doctorate and my doctoral thesis as if it were gold-pressed platinum. All the while asking myself if I was a historian first and a writer second, or a writer that just happened to be an academic historian?

When I finally did begin working on the manuscript, in the summer of ’02, I think that I was writing about four different books. It had an academic side to it, a look at magnet school programs and their inherent arrogance around diversity and race, not to mention intelligence, especially in the 80s. I was also writing narrative nonfiction, ala Eric Schlosser and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, as well as fitting in bits and piece of memoir. And Meltzer, during my second and what would turn out to be final interview with him, suggested that I might want to turn the project into a novel. Why fiction? Because, in so many words, I wouldn’t piss anyone among the living with a Mount Vernon connection off.

Boy, I had no idea how right he was! Not about making Boy @ The Window a work of fiction. But about how many people I’d turn off or have attack me just during the research phase of the project. More people turned me down for interviews than granted them in the first years. If I sold it to them as a research project, I could hear their eyes glaze over while discussing it on the phone or in their keyboard strokes in an email. I pissed off many more as I started to write, as I did more interviews, as I started my blog in June ’07. I found out that I was defiling sacrosanct ground when writing about “Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon.”

I mistakenly began to shop the manuscript around in looking for an agent almost before I’d finished my first full draft of it. I had an agent for Fear of a “Black” America, but I’d found her in ’99, and the industry had changed so much in the eight years before I started looking for one again. I found myself having to have a well-thought out marketing strategy without having defined Boy @ The Window as a full-fledged

Neil Diamond, "Love On The Rocks" at concert, November 19, 2010. Source: https://www.rockbackingtracks.co.uk/images/neil_diamond.jpg

memoir at this point. It wasn’t a disaster, as I managed to get about thirty percent of the agents I contacted interested enough to look at my unpolished manuscript. Before their standard rejections would come back.

Licking my wounds and being more patient, to continue to revise and re-polish and repeat for most of ’09 and this year was hardly a bad thing. Realizing that my wife never liked the idea of me working on Boy @ The Window was harder, much, much harder than any agent’s multiple-xeroxed form rejection letter. I’d been in denial about it for about three years. It was when I sat down at the end of ’09 to do a long-overdue overhaul of the memoir that she finally made it obvious to me that I’d violated some unwritten rule in our marriage about delving too deeply in my past. It was about a year ago that I realized that — at least on the subject of Boy @ The Window — I’d lost my significant other of fifteen years, who simply wanted and wants me to move on.

There’s no doubt, though, that the biggest mistake I’ve ever made as a writer was to choose to not see myself as a writer for the better part of two decades. That’s probably the reason why it’s taken me years to work on Boy @ The Window, why I’m still a forty-one-year-old late bloomer in this calling of mine. That I’ve made as many mistakes as I have and still remain hopeful about publishing this memoir is, well, both crazy and just the thing I need to get through, I suppose. My former AP English teacher Rosemary Martino was right about one thing. Writing really does take sacrifice.

Kiss From A Rose (or [sigh] “Hi” )

20 Thursday May 2010

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Fifteen years ago on this date, I re-met the woman who’s now my wife of ten years, Angelia on a PAT-Transit bus in Pittsburgh, the old 71B-Highland Park into Oakland. It was an eighty-five degree Saturday afternoon in the ‘Burgh. I decided to treat myself to a movie, Batman Forever, mostly because I knew Val Kilmer was in it. After seeing him act as well as he did in Tombstone, I figured I needed to give it a try. I needed a break, between the euphoria of the Spencer Fellowship and the depression from the fire at 616 that had rendered my family homeless.

So here it was, 3:15 in the afternoon, with me dressed in a blue t-shirt with blue basketball shorts and sneaks. I was standing at the corner of Highland Avenue and Penn Circle South, across from my apartment building, waiting for a bus. The 71B showed up first. I jumped on, sat down on the right-hand side in a front-facing seat. As soon as I sat down, I saw her, sitting right in front of me. It was “Angela with an ‘i’,” Angelia, like that Richard Marx song from ’90.

The thing was, I had a dream that she showed up in the Saturday before this one. I hadn’t seen Angelia in more than two years, hadn’t given her any thought. But it seemed weird that she would just show up a week later in the flesh.

So I said, “Hi Angelia!,” excitedly, wondering what she was doing on the bus. She paused, said “Hi” with the heaviest, stop-bothering-me sigh I’d heard since my high school days. That didn’t deter me. I coaxed out of her the fact that she was pissed off with Carnegie Library because a book she was looking for at the East Liberty branch wasn’t there, even though the catalog said it was. It was a conversation that was one-sided, with Angelia doing most of the complaining.

I listened, and thought, “Yep, same Angelia, same weird Angelia.” But since I was weird also, I kept listening. Finally, she asked me what I was up to. I told her about school, my Spencer Fellowship, my family’s homelessness situation. I kept it brief. I mean, I hadn’t seen her in two years.

By the time we reached Oakland — me to catch one of the 61s to Squirrel Hill to catch the movie, Angelia to walk over to the main branch of Carnegie Library — we exchanged numbers, with Angelia saying, “It was really good talking to you.” I wasn’t so sure about that myself, but at least, she didn’t seem as weird as the woman she was five years earlier.

I went to see the movie, and it sucked, just like Angelia said it would. I walked home, got together some grub, and through all preconceptions out the window. I gave her a call to tell her that she was right about the film. We ended up talking for more than three hours! It was the first time in a long time I had talked to a woman who wanted to hear what I thought about, well, anything, at least anything outside of sex. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Marriage in the Un-marriage Age

29 Thursday Apr 2010

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DNA Marriage, April 28, 2000

Yesterday made it ten full years since me and my wife Angelia exchanged marriage vows. Even though this is a great thing, this marriage and love of ours, it ain’t been a crystal stair either. Meshing our ways, our likes and dislikes, our approaches to life, and our baggage can still cause me and Angelia more gray hairs, not to mention ulcers. Noah has taken up much of our lives and time over the past seven years, leaving precious little time to work on our relationship. None of this takes into account the ups and downs of job security, financial stability, going back to school, and taking chances with our careers that can take their toll on any marriage, no matter how much spouses love each other.

The average long-term marriage lasts about fifteen years, so if I or one of you were to take a cynical perspective, you could say that our marriage has already reached the zenith, due to decline into a slow, painful cycle before the big D occurs. After all, we all have our issues, me in particular. With my socioeconomic background, I still find it amazing sometimes that anyone would fall in love with me, much less marry me. Prior to 2000, I never made more than $21,000 in a year, and the most I’ve made in any year in our ten-year marriage is $80,000 (although, that number represents most of our years together). With the financial problems we’ve had the past three years, including the feast and famine of consulting work — not to mention my work to publish Boy @ The Window — most women would’ve moved on for that reason alone. That’s the nature of marriage in an age in which money justifies almost everything people in our world do.

But there’s more, much more. I’ve discovered through a decade of marriage how truly imperfect and human I am. The high level of emotional control that I demonstrate in the workplace or in the classroom can be missing at times in my marriage. I care so much about making all of our lives better that I sound like I don’t care at all. I’ve been tempted — although not seriously so — about three or four times by other women over the years. Nothing approaching adultery has ever actually taken place. But temptation in one’s mind is still a challenge, one that all of us adult humans face. I’ve felt a number of times that a week away by myself on South Beach would be a good thing for both of us. And all of these things have been expressed in so many ways by Angelia over the past ten years as well.

So how does this thing work, this marriage, when our lives are so unbalanced, when we’re still growing and maturing as individuals, when dramatic changes occur in our lives, when there are children involved? I don’t have any major words of wisdom. All I know is, that after ten years, I still enjoying talking to my wife about everything. God, social justice, education, teaching, sports, music, sex, politics. I don’t tell Angelia every thought I have at every moment of every day the way I used to. But I do prefer to share things with her first before approaching any of my friends or current and former co-workers. I really can’t imagine having this kind of relationship with anyone else.

If I had to do this over again, would I get married again? Probably not. I’ve learned that when it comes right down to it, any serious relationship, in order for it to be a successful one, requires commitment, communications, and a rooted and grounded love. Having a piece of paper in the form of a marriage certificate, or even exchanging vows before God does not guarantee much but heartache and debt if the marriage doesn’t work out after the honeymoon. Marriage as we know it today is a two-century-or-so institution that sells us the dreams of harmonious, monogamous heterosexual relationships that are nominally sanctioned by God, but more directly, sanctioned by our government and economic system.

Knowing this, knowing all of the hard work that’s involved in maintaining a marriage, requires the ability to separate a relationship from the junk that has accumulated in our minds about how a marriage ought to be. Whoever thinks about their marriage in this way has ignored the human factor, the fact that we married another human being, not a robot that can only express unconditional love. Ultimately, for a real marriage to work, it means rejecting most of what we’ve learned about marriage from poets, priests and politicians (as Sting and The Police would say). It means having a marriage based only on who you are and who your spouse is, not one on societal, religious or others expectations. Which is why I would have the nerve to suggest that, looking back, I might not have gotten married to Angelia, at least in the way we define it these days.

Oh, I can hear it now. The voices of my more godly acquaintances, of men and (mostly) women complaining about what I’ve suggested. That I should feel lucky that I’m with a woman who understands me and would be willing to allow me to post this sacrilegious document. And how dare I go against the dictates of my God and Christianity. Fine. Believe what you will about me. I actually don’t care. But understand this. Any real commitment to another human being that involves supporting each other’s growth and maturing, the development and raising of another child, a love that endures through hardship and suffering as well as the good times, doesn’t need marriage as justification.

And yes, I’m a lucky man. To have the love and support of a wonderfully weird woman who understands me in ways few people in this world, including my mother, have even attempted to. To have been able to spend almost fifteen years in love with my best friend, with ten of those in marriage. If it somehow doesn’t last, if the worst occurs somehow, I still believe that I will always cherish the years we’ve had together, and the future that we will continue to strive for and in.

First Contact

22 Thursday Apr 2010

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I met my wife Angelia (pronounced Angela, or, as she would say, “it’s ‘Angela’ with an ‘i'”) twenty years ago today. It was an early spring Saturday evening, one that’s typically crispy-cold in Pittsburgh. Our mutual friend Bryan was throwing himself an apartment-warming party. Bryan has recently moved into an apartment building in the Bloomfield/Friendship section of the ‘Burgh. I vaguely remember Bryan complaining that his one-bedroom apartment was $420/month, which, in Pittsburgh even now, could get you a one-bedroom apartment bigger than our first place in Silver Spring. Still, he was happy to have his own place, to not living at home or with roommates.

I was in a rare place of peace at the time of Bryan’s party. I had found my stride in my social life, with real friends, a solid group of acquaintances, and wonderful times. I was doing well academically without it being an obsession. And I was working, but only fifteen hours a week, leaving time to do so many other things like going to clubs and hanging out all hours. Bryan had become one of the folks in my circle that I could talk to about school, work, social issues, and music. Even though has was also the only person I knew who truly liked the late Barbara Sizemore, a professor in the Black Studies department at Pitt who had served as superintendent of DC Public Schools in the mid-1970s. To say that Sizemore was abrasive would be an insult to Brillo Pads mixed with pumice. But Bryan loved her, and though I had figured out that Bryan was gay, I assumed that he also wanted to marry her.

I was a bit surprised to have been invited to one of Bryan’s parties, which were sophisticated compared to the college-scene parties I’d been to before my junior year at Pitt. Now I’d see something like that and say that Bryan was trying too hard for an Iberian/Bohemian effect, minus the weed and the crystal meth. But back then, it would’ve been like being a working-class character on Kelsey Grammer’s show Frasier, all awe-struck by the expanse of space that I saw when I first walked in his place on April 22 two decades ago.

It was a place that I would’ve never, ever complained about back then, with a small foyer, a kitchen with more counter space than we have even now, and a bedroom larger than my one-room firetrap of an efficiency in South Oakland. Bryan had turned his living room into a meet-and-greet-and-dance space, with red-colored light bulbs and red candles lit. The beverage of choice was Bryan’s own margarita concoction, blended just right. Blended so well that I was on my third before I realized that there was a ton of alcohol in it.

That was when I met my future wife for the first time. It was the first time we had met, but not the first time I’d ever seen here. Six weeks before, on an eighty-plus degree March day just before Spring Break, me, my friend Kenny and a couple of others sat on the corner of Forbes and Bigelow. We were across the street from the Cathedral of Learning, outside of the William Pitt Union, rating the young women (and men) as they walked by. It was fun of course, and some of the women knew what we were doing, so we did catch hell at times. Then this tall woman with a middling skirt walked by, her head held up high, her cheeks as puffy as a bird’s, her hair and makeup done really well. Kenny said, “She looks thirteen!,” and we all burst out laughing as she walked by. She didn’t notice, oblivious to the humor we were having at her expense.

Angelia was Bryan’s boss at his part-time interviewer job with Campos Market Research. Bryan was such a connector/networker (as Malcolm Gladwell would describe him if he knew Bryan back then) that he could become friends with almost anyone in those days. Bryan had apparently invited the two of us to the party to meet, to set up two of his Black friends, as if height alone would bring us together. Angelia was already in an on-and-off again relationship with a third-string Pitt football player, one whom I’d met before. A man with a head bigger than Donovan McNabb’s, but whose athletic skills were average at best. Angelia had recently become a part-time student at Pitt while working full-time hours at Campos in downtown Pittsburgh. She probably wasn’t in the mood to meet a young man about sixteen months away from graduate school.

Bryan introduced us. She was just over six-feet tall, with her hair permed and teased. Angelia was wearing a pink-and-white checkered blouse, with the front-fringe tied into a knot. She wore a long, flared dark-denim skirt with sheet pantyhose and short heels. She was attractive. Until I started talking to her. Angelia’s voice, with that Pittsburgh accent, reminded me of listening to a duck as it bit another one in a pond in a fight over pieces of floating bread. She sounded weird, and she seemed bored. Then, when Angelia asked me about school, and I told her that “It’s going well. I have a chance to get a 4.0 this semester,” I might as well have said that “I’m doing much better than you.” At least according to her. Bryan apparently asked Angelia, “What do you think?” “He’s arrogant!,” she apparently blurted out in response. When Bryan asked me what I thought of Angelia, I said, “She’s weird!” Given what I was like back then, me calling someone weird was saying something.

Needless to say, we didn’t exactly hit it off. But I kept bumping into her in the weeks after the night at Bryan’s margarita-ville. During my two weeks working for Campos, thanks to Bryan. During the summer on Pitt’s campus. The following fall, where we inadvertently ended up seeing a movie together and going out to eat afterward. It would take nearly six years to get beyond “arrogant” and “weird” to significant others. And another four before our marriage. I guess this disproves the idea that you have only one chance to make a first impression.