You know how you can love someone beyond words but they can annoy you within an inch of their lives?

Let me backtrack a bit...I have to say that when I first fell in love with my future husband, I worshipped him. I was totally head over heels in love. He was my everything. I was a college freshman and he was the handsome first yr. surgical resident. I put him on a pedestal and treated every word he uttered as the gospel. Richard certainly didn't demand  this idolatry but he must have enjoyed it.

We had the most magical love story and I believed no two people ever loved each other more. We had such an intense physical attraction that when together our friends had a running joke and would shout,"Pour cold water on them" Since Richard was 8 years older, before we married he had a cautionary admonition for me. "I'm pretty much who I'm going to be but you still have some maturing andself-discovery ahead.

He was right. I went from believing everything he said was brilliant to questioning and challenging him and then as he likes to tell it, that pedestal toppled quickly. According to him, he felt like Rodney Dangerfield who got no respect.  Yet, it made our relationship more exciting and dynamic. I kept him on his toes and we both grew.

We have never had major blow ups regarding values, vision, goals or how to raise our children because we really made sure we were on the same page before we committed to marriage. I think the best way to describe what sets each of us off is we have a different threshold of tolerance for things. Richard wears his OCD badge with pride. He lines up items in the grocery shopping cart by size place and alphabetical order. If one sheet in the linen closet is out of perfect alignment, he will pull them all out and refold muttering and cursing under his breath as he completes the task. If you move a pen of his a fraction to the left or God Forbid remove it, he will track you down like a bounty hunter and not let you rest until that pen is returned to its rightful  place.  Unfortunately for him, I am oblivious to these details and honestly could care less which makes him crazy.

I think probably the most exasperating element in our relationship is how polar opposite our brain circuitry is. My husband is the  most logical step by step concrete plodding person you will ever meet. He is a totally linear concrete thinker with great attention to detail. This has served him well in his long and successful surgical career. 

I, to his frustration and continued chagrin am an abstract non linear intuitive thinker. I can get from step 1 to step 23 in a microsecond and arrive at the correct answer but don't ask me to explain how I got there. My thinking is all over the place. I can be thinking about a variety of non-related things at once and introduce all these topics into a conversation with my husband. He will be merciless in stopping me every other word because he can make no sense out of what I am talking about. 

If you want to know  specifically what happened at a 3PM meeting he attended, he will first need to provide a play by play of his entire day beginning with leaving the apt. first thing in the morning. By the time he gets to the meeting, I want to pull my hair out. So, needless to say as crazy as we are about each other, that's how crazy we can make each other. Richard has told me countless times that the scariest thing he can imagine is living inside my head for a day. He has also not so affectionately nicknamed me Inspector Clousseau because I ask what he considers endless questions. I think of it as intellectual curiousity. He thinks of it as a pain in the ass. Richard cannot fathom why I would need to know something or even care about it. His plaintive cry is "Who thinks about these things??" My answer is of course, "I do."

So I have set the stage for our day to day-year to year interaction. It was only during the viewing of a movie that I had an ephiphany...an awakening...a true sense of the  depth of despair  to which my alien thinking had driven my husband... I will never forget it.

We were at the theater watching the film "Reversal of Fortune" It is the true story of how Claus Von Bulow was arrested and tried for allegedly attempting to murder his wife heiress Sunny by injecting her with insulin and puttin her into a diabetic coma.  Von Bulow had hired the most brilliant defense attorney Alan Dershowitz and in a private conversation during the jury's deliberation he asked his lawyer to assess his chances.

"Alan, do you think I will be found guilty?"

Dershowitz with great confidence responds, "Claus, I purposely stacked the jury with mostly men. You shouldn't worry. There isn't a husband alive who hasn't fantasized about murdering his wife."  The silence in that movie theater was jarringly disturbed by a singular person's uncontollable laughter of recognition....  

I glared at Richard and demanded, "Why are you laughing?"

His answer was "Because it is so true."

Of course I needed to know if I had to sleep with one eye open and so continued conversation in the car on the way home. My husband, thought Deshowitz' comment was both funny and insightful. He actuallly challenged me to ask any husband that question and if he were truthful would admit that was his fantasy. He assured me he would never act on it but to my logical concrete husband it made perfect sense that the person he loved most in the world was also capable of driving him bananas and there were times he did a virtual "To the Moon Alice."   

I let him know he needn't resort to such violence or anything creative like putting me through a wood chipper or sending my severed body parts to different zipcodes. If things ever reached a point of incompatiblity we would just gently and civilly figure out how toconsciously uncouple or ofcourse in those days it was "part ways."  I actually took him up on his challenge of asking any married man if murdering his wife was his fantasy and brought it up to my married male colleagues. They looked at me like I had three heads.

Anyway, we have had many funny conversations about this and Richard always assures me there is a reason the spouse is always the first  person of interest when a wife goes missing. He also assures me tht as much as sometimes he can't live with me what he never ever wants to do is live without me. He has even confessed to being envious of the way my mind works sometimes because of how quickly I can arrive at answers that requires him to work through step by step.

Of course life works in strange and miraculous ways...

What we both have absolutely no difference of opinion on or conflict  about is how much we totally and insanely adore our granddaugher who has named Richard- RayRay. He saysEdie is my mini-me and whenever this three year old munchkin-extraordinaire is  with us she is relentless in her questioning

"Ray Ray, What is this?"

Ray Ray,What do you mean?"

Ray Ray, How does this work?"

Ray Ray has nicknamed Edie "Inspector Clousseau The Second" and the only thing her grandpa fantasizes about is living long enough to answer every one of her questions and to be there for every stage of her life....