How Large Is My Burka?

The other day while surfing the net I ran across the website of a spiritual director/marriage counselor who proclaimed that marriages go through four stages: romance, disillusion, misery, awakening.  I'd love to put a voter-box on my blog (if I knew how to do that!) asking, "Do you agree or disagree that marriage starts with romance, gets all mixed up with lost dreams and pain, and then somehow awakens again to love?" What would group wisdom say about that?  But instead I'll just think about people I barely know (I'd never think of the marriages of people I do know) and, "Yep, that's actually a pretty accurate picture."  True, some marriages hiccup through those stages while others hit speedbumps going full blast, but the belief that a good marriage goes straight from "falling in love" to "till death do us part" with only positive feelings is apparently more myth than reality.

And there's the rub.  Our daughter is getting married in September to the love-of-her-life.  Of course, there is always the exception to the rule.

Last Saturday I almost literally bumped into a woman who might have been married or not. Hard to tell.  I was heading from Twickenham to London on the District line underground train.  Running late and needing to change trains at Hammersmith to catch the Piccadilly line, I started quickly running down the stairs to the Piccadilly line as I heard the train approach.  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I could see the train's door was still open.  Even though I wasn't sure what direction it was going--east or west, I threw myself into the crowded car as the doors slammed shut behind me.  Struggling to get my balance, I looked up to find I was staring into a pair of eyes peeking out from a burka.  Aside from her eyes the woman was completely covered head to toe in black.

"Does this train go to Hyde Park?"  I asked her trying to keep my eyes from sliding down her front to get a really good look.  Barely six inches separated my red coat from her black gown.  Her eyes had no wrinkles around them.  I immediately looked at the man standing to the right of her.  "A pair of eyes can't answer a question," I thought.  "You need a mouth to talk." 

"Yes, it does," the young man answered me.  Was she his wife?  She turned and said something to him, not me.  Although I could hear "Hyde Park", the rest was a mumble.  

"So it does go to Hyde Park?" I asked him again noticing the lack of a wedding band on his hand which was holding onto the pole.  Maybe she was his cousin or friend.  

"Yes, it does," he said again.  It felt strange to be looking and talking with him instead of her as though she wasn't present.

"Thanks!" I said.  Then with as much grace as possible in the overcrowded train I tried to slowly and nonchantantly turn myself around to face the door.

"Well, that wasn't exactly an in-depth interview with a woman hiding in the hills of Afghanistan which would be what someone living a large life would do," I think.  "But it was a few words between me and a woman in a burka.  And I never thought that would happen.  Maybe I'm not living such a small life after all." 

Since reading Carol Shields' book Stone Diaries, I have been in a funk over the question "Am I living a small life or a large one?" This is the question Stone Diaries raises about the main character Daisy. Motherless from birth, Daisy grows up living apart from her dad, marries twice, raises three children, works for nine years, and finally, nearly ninety, dies in a Florida nursing home.  I hadn't thought it was such a small conventional life.  True, she hadn't invented a cure for cancer or set any world records, but her life contained relationships, struggles, love and seemed as full as anyone's life usually is.  Apparently, however, most of the book reviewers did not.  They came to the conclusion that Daisy lived a life, like most women born in the first half of the twentieth century, that never reached or what is worse, never even tried  to reach, its potential or possibilities.  This was a bit disconcerting to me as in many ways I related to Daisy.  Am I, too, living a small conventional life not stretching out to all the possibilities and potential that are within me? Am I living in the shadow of other people, not claiming my own life? And what would the reviewers say about the woman in the burka?

It's a haunting question to face while surfing the net or riding the train.  How does one decide what makes a life large or small?  Who decides?  Are there certain things one has to have or do to qualify for large?  Or can lives be both small and large, maybe even on the same day?