Maybe my friend would not like the movie "Julie and Julia" since it is true that nobody gets shot and nothing is blown up (in the usual sense of a bomb or dynamite). However, I recommend the movie to all men who are married or might get married or wish to reflect on marriage. I found it a fun show to watch but I was puzzled about how it could be that much fun when it is about two women cooking. Well, of course, cooking is important to us all. Try eating only raw carrots for a few days for a reminder that as Michael Pollan says in The Omnivore's Dilemma, for us, variety matters. But it is not the cooking that gets my husbandly attention. It is the support, encouragement and delight that both husbands find in the energy, intelligence, emotional battle and creativity in which each of the two women design and work through a large, demanding and challenging project. There were many scenes and dialogs I felt were things I experience quite often.
I just said I wanted to take a walk. Lynn said she would enjoy walking with me but would I mind waiting 15 to 30 minutes while she finished a letter? I started writing this post. When she finished her letter, she said she wanted to walk on the beach and that she guessed I wouldn't want to do that. She was right so now I am ready to walk but have been delayed a bit. I feel my walks are often less than exciting but that they are medicine I need and want. I think she is not motivated to do too much for medicine's sake alone and wants variety, something interesting, novel and/or beautiful, much like both Julie Powell and Julia Child. Both husbands, Eric and Paul, understand the same needs in their wives and respond to them, although both show frustration at times with the length of their wives' projects and the emotional ups and downs that go with success and failure in cooking and writing.
At times when I feel being married is too much bother and complain of the related baggage (Latin for baggage is "impedimenta"), Lynn assures me that I don't know the half of it. Try being a wife and mother she says. We both know that I am not wired for much patience but it was fun watching two husbands stretch themselves toward support and celebration of the women's accomplishments.
