Breathing Lessons

"It's just time to marry, that's all," she said. "I'm so tired of dating!
I'm so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years. It's going to be like getting out of a girdle; that's exactly how I picture it."

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boy's lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the panty hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.

Serena had made such a point of being different. She was so thorny and spiky, so quick to get her hackles up and order you out of her sight forever. (How many times had she and Maggie stopped speaking-Serena swishing past as grandly as a duchess?)

Oh, this whole day was so terribly sad, the kind of day when you realize that everyone eventually got lost from everyone else;

People had to be reminded, that was all. The way the world was going now, it was so easy to forget.

Today's question on AM Baltimore was: "What Makes an Ideal Marriage?" A woman was phoning in to say it was common interests. "Like if you both watch the same kind of programs on TV," she explained.