Marriage Moats- Unresolved Chord

Published: Sun, 07/01/12

Marriage Moats

Caring for Marriage

I was listening to a piece of music this morning. I don't know the composer, but the ending is still with me. There was a chord that leaned like a Lamborghini tilted on its right wheels, going around the corner in a Steve McQueen car chase. It begged for resolution. The song finally slid into the dominant and my shoulders uncurled.

Probably there is a mathematical equation producers use to stretch out a dramatic scene so that it sends a jolt of adrenaline surging through the audience like a zap of electricity without actually frying them. Since I watch fewer movies than most people I have a lower threshold. My kids often stop watching the movie and start watching me as I spring from my seat in panic.

No doubt there is a secret formula for musicians too, as they compose a fugue or a twangy love song. An augmented seventh wakes up a somnolent listener, raising their eyebrows for the finale.

John loves barbershop tunes, which typically fling the last few notes of the tagline like kids at Disneyland who refuse to "keep their arms and legs inside the car until it comes to a full and complete stop".

The other day I was at a party and noticed the dissonance playing out in many of the lives around me.... relationships that teetered on two wheels, health issues pending resolution, jobs going over the cliff, marriages headed for a crash.

Although I hesitate to compare God to the likes of Robert Wagner, they both seem to employ a theme of tension. Yet in the case of God, resolution comes flooding in like a full orchestra.

My mother's final years had more discord than the michelins at an Indy 500. She had been separated from her husband for the last ten years of his life. Then she was widowed for ten more. Mom lost everything she owned in a flood, then watched the replacements float away in a second deluge. Her vision succumbed to cataracts, her strength to anemia. One nurse in the hospital when she was having a transfusion peeked into her room to see the lady who actually had a hemoglobin of four. Mania plagued her exhausted brain until she was too weak from breast cancer to care.

Yet the conflict ended. She healed. I hear the echo of her life like background music. Some of the words she mumbled in her last hours render all of the thrashing conflict obsolete.

"Wow! Amazing! Great! You did that? Is this a holiday? You're nice to hold my hand. What are we celebrating? I've never seen that before. I have everything."

Photo by Andy Sullivan

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