Amy, Shamu, and a Happy Marriage

I've tried and tried to find a good author, one that has perfect comedic timing--and possibly one that sheds light onto the mundane realities of life and turns it into something people with a 50-point IQ can easily digest. I used to find such things in some of Stephen King's novels. That was during a time when my taste for literature bordered on the macabre, and those that Anais Nin wrote.

Recently I've found myself crawling page after page within the last section of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. It will be adapted into film, you've heard? Yeah, I know it'd suck! Read the book. Don't watch the film.

As for the quest for a good author? I found Amy Sutherland who wrote 2006's "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers." I haven't read this article she wrote for the New York Times, but I'm posting it anyway.

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage

By Amy Sutherland

AS I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human's upset.

In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the faucet and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides like, "Don't worry, they'll turn up." But that only made him angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog.

Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I don't turn around. I don't say a word. I'm using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.

I love my husband. He's well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage.

But he also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercurial. He hovers around me in the kitchen asking if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker when I'm trying to concentrate on the simmering pans. He leaves wadded tissues in his wake. He suffers from serious bouts of spousal deafness but never fails to hear me when I mutter to myself on the other side of the house. "What did you say?" he'll shout.

Read full story