Insistence and chip pans

The thing lurking in that wad of plastic bags is a chip pan lathered in 5 year old oil. Gooey, rancid oil.

We were cooking a couple of weeks ago, and lamenting that each other's eating habits tend to nibble away at each of our basic "try not to get too fat while eating joyfully" regimens. I noted that I've been shoveling fries into my piehole at most opportunities since I met F, ranging from the luscious perfect chips of Skye to the indifferent dried out things that accompany my BLTs at the diner near the university. "Remind me not to order the chips with my next grilled cheese sandwich," I asked. "Oh, I can make much better chips!" he said. And burbled happily over to find the pan... which he realized had remained unwashed, well, since the last woman he'd lived with had moved out. Nearly 5 years ago.

"Hm, when an englishman is sad, he stops making chips," he observed. As we both gazed into the unearthly goo that had become something between liquid and solid. The sort of thing that guy at 3M would have made postits and a fortune out of.

Nothing so serendipitous. F attacked it with a scrubber and managed to pry the inner basket out of its glutinous prison. We ran out of time and inclination to deal with the cast iron part, the plastic bags containing the worst of the stink of disturbed rancid oil.

I mentioned it, in passing, to my online friends. "YUCK!" they chorused. "I'd INSIST he throw that out! He can't try to clean that."

I told F about the conversation. He's a good sport about my chatting about our lives online, but we both got stuck on this point. "I don't think I could *insist* about anything," I said. "It's your thing." It came up again in the car on our long drive back from la verendrye a couple of weeks ago. "What kind of relationship is it, where you could INSIST that I throw this out?" he said. It was partly that word that hung us up, but it also made us pensive. We couldn't put our fingers on it, exactly, but fumbled to describe the kind of merging we don't want, where one person's idiosyncrasies become the stuff of the couple, where I could paper-covers-rock trump this foible that's a bit gross but doesn't really affect me. Even if the pan sits on the counter, it doesn't affect me -- and even if this were really my kitchen, not just the terrain slightly uneasily shared, where I buy and produce good food but F still gets edgy if I put the glasses back upside down, let the potatoes on the stove boil over.

But -- what's the right level of merge, if it's not domain over each other's doings? What *is* the twined-together unit, and when *is* it okay to assert your own preferences (a fancy word for needs) about the other person's choices?

It's the essence of trying to figure out how to integrate, this chip pan. This one's a clear line -- it's his project, his icon of some cultural connection, his kitchen, at the bottom line. Not my place to really care, one way or another. But it also represents the 98% of F's life that's taken place without me. So many stories I don't figure in. I've never really had to consolidate this much history in my relationships, never had to "start over" with someone when we've both trod so many maps with other people, lived completely different lives.

It does jar sometimes. It's so easy, so tempting to try to insist on what meaning should be made of the past, to downplay what counted before we met. I've seen other people do this, to declare at second weddings that they've never known love before -- and I've been enraged by it.

But finding the right thread isn't that simple, either. Two fully formed beings merging is harder fought in many ways than supple, open-eyed beginnings. When you're jammed full of your own stories, where do you find the clean loom for new ones without forcing each other's perspectives, pasts, underground? What's the source of generativity, when it's not finding newness together, when the possibilities are less about what you can discover together for the first time, and more about seeing things with new eyes, the familiar in a palimpsest over always visible, sometimes achingly present, past lives? It's stupid things, like the disparity of realizing that I've never been to cities he's tired of. Part of me wanting to childishly stomp my foot with annoyance over that. The sensible part of me knowing that what we do together is new because it's us.

A recognition that there are things I won't do because I'm 42 and didn't do them with A... as well as realizing that there are things that for some reason, A and I didn't make possible for each other, that F and I will find together. It's constant gear shifting, finding the flow of the now and a vaguely sketched out future, when the past is present, waltzing ghosts we sometimes duck, sometimes nod in rhythm with, sometimes grab the hands of to make new dances with.