I am weirdly attuned to Andrea’s voice. She and I were at a
party years ago, and I knew the people well enough in this crowd that I was milling
about comfortably on my own and not standing in a corner doing threat assessments. We were on opposite ends of this gathering when she called out to me, “Hey, Hon…”
She wasn’t speaking loudly, and I wasn’t in line of sight of her. When I came
around a corner asking, “Hey. What’s up?”, one of our friends who saw the
exchange nearly dropped his drink.
“Lawd have mercy! Mmm-hmm. The two of y’all got some funky,
mystical voodoo working between you.”
In the last years before our marriage, we were living very
separate lives in different parts of the country. She was in DC working an internship, and I was in
Birmingham keeping corporate IT on their toes. While far from ideal, we were making the whole long distance thing
work. This was well before cell phones and unlimited minutes, so every one of
our calls to each other had a clock on it. Our phone bills from all those late-night
conversations were not an insignificant monthly expense. But it was worth the long hours of being tethered to a land line and getting sore from holding the receiver in the crook of my neck. I just wanted to hear her voice. I’d found that just hearing her and not even seeing her
was enough to provide a salve if I’d had a less than stellar day.
I know how hard long separations can be on a kid. I went
through it with every deployment of Dad’s. It’s inherently different but just
as hard for a couple. Since we’ve been married, Andrea and I have been apart
more than a few days exactly once. In the weeks after Dad’s death, I stayed
back in Mississippi to be with Mom and Grandma while Andrea flew back to
Maryland. The distance and emotional drainage I was going through were mitigated by the frequent calls between us.
Once again, just hearing her voice was the balm my wrecked soul needed.
In an unfortunate irony, it’s another family loss that will bring our count of long separations to two. She’s returning to Maryland to contend with work issues requiring her physical presence, and I’m staying on in the area to both hang out with Mom and be near Andrea’s sisters in the event something is needed. The one positive development in this situation is in the intervening years since we were first married, there is no longer a cap on call minutes and my neck and shoulders are already thankful for the hands free technology that's come along.
Most of all, I'm looking forward to those evenings when, after dealing with a day's daily dose of issues, of letting the soothing voodoo spell that is her voice wash over me again.
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