Get Lucky

Rome, 2012

Last year when we went to Italy1, we met a lovely Irish couple at a pub patio in Rome on our first night. Well, I met a lovely Irish couple while Adam splayed himself along the sidewalk twenty metres away, headphones on, arm out-stretched over the gutter, trying to pick up the sounds of passing traffic against the cobblestone on his field-recorder. “THE BUSSES SOUND AMAZING!” he shouted excitedly as he ran off to record it. He was drunk on Moretti but mostly just excited about recording the sounds of a new city. When he returned to the table he started speaking in a terrible Irish accent, and my new friends Stephen & Claire jokingly asked me if I was serious when I introduced him as my boyfriend.  It’s not at all uncommon to find Adam hooking a microphone up to a tree or recording the sounds of moving ice during a walk,  or tearing a part a Barbie walkman he found at a thrift shop to create something new. Once I saw him plug an Altoids tin into an amp and proceed to play it. He recently finished a collaborative LP2, and the list of sounds used includes things like: “bathtub”,  “innards of a music box”, “canvas”, “water”,  “plastic tubing”, and “wooden spoon”. 

Cozumel, 2013

A day later when we met up with them again, Claire’s sandal broke as we meandered around to find a place to grab a pint3. Adam promptly insisted he walk the twenty minutes back to our hotel to get Claire the extra pair of flip-flops I’d packed. That’s often what it’s like when you meet Adam: maybe he’s laying in a busy street screaming about sounds,  but if your shoe breaks, he’ll find you a new pair. He’s already made it his mission. He may berate you for an hour if you mention you’re a fan of James Taylor4 and his “painful mediocrity”, for example, but if you think you need 7-11 cheesy nachos at 3 am, he’s already on his way to the store.

That’s who he is though. Eccentric & kind, non-judgmental & creative, selectively passionate & never boring.

“No Pictures”,  Toronto 2010

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Adam and I have been together for seven years. We’ve shared the same employer and the same bed for nearly six of those years. It’s hard to believe we’ve spent nearly every waking moment together for that long, and I can’t believe we’ve actually managed to make it work, not that we aren’t without the occasional instant-message argument between the hours of 9 & 5.

Recording a tree

I can’t seem to tell the story of how we met because I’m not really sure. We share the same hometown but because he’s three years older we didn’t cross paths too often until I’d graduated high school. He insists that it was his doing, claiming after a party he’d asked a mutual friend for my email address so he could add me to his MSN list. Yeah. His MSN list. That was a thing. When Adam tells this story, he always reminds me that he was first attracted to me because my eyes reminded him of  a  “cartoon bunny rabbits”, soooo… I’m not exactly sure what that says about me OR him. Somewhere down the line we started speaking on the phone though, and I fell in love with his mind immediately.

Zollamtsbrücke, Vienna, 2010

On October 2nd, seven years to the day Adam awkwardly asked me-to-sorta-be-his-girlfriend, he turned to me and this time asked me to be his wife.  This was a shock only because he had always said he would propose to me by blowing a smoke-ring around my finger outside the Army-Surplus near our office,  and here he  was holding before me a little black box with a stunning emerald ring in it (so obviously I was disappointed. I mean, a smoke-ring!). I couldn’t figure out how he managed to get a ring without my noticing.  After the initial shock wore off, I said yes, obviously, because I’m not TOTALLY crazy. I think I can speak for both of us when I say we don’t really care about the idea of marriage, just that we were always committed to each other. I do feel a little different though, in a good way.  Plus, I’ve always hated the term ‘boyfriend’ and ‘fiancé’ I can’t seem to say aloud, so I’m looking forward to not cringing when I refer to my ‘husband’.

I don’t know how to write about how I feel about Adam. I love him more as the years pass. He’s my best friend and partner. My fella. He forgives me when I’m being an asshole, he pushes me to be a better artist, helps me to be a better friend, teaches me how to forgive, makes up the bed every night, makes me coffee every morning, and he proposed to me while I sported a wine-stained mouth, covered in paint. Even when we go to bed angry, he will always reach over and offer a touch, even if I usually reject it because he stabs me with his toenails.

I got lucky.5

Electric Eclectics, Meaford, ON  2010 (Photo by Sabarah Pilon)

I met Adam when he was twenty-two and since then he’s been saying he’s “almost thirty”. Today he is actually thirty. Happy 40th birthday then, BALL AND CHAIN! I tell you every day but I’ll do it here, too, on the Internet: I love you. Thanks for sticking it out with me. Can’t wait to marry you ‘n shit.

The Rivoli, Toronto, 2010 (photo by Brooke Manning)

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|NOTES|
1↩
Adam won this ridiculously lavish trip (A week in Rome, Florence & Venice) via Facebook contest through OkTire. No, seriously.↩
2↩
WABI SABI by Modo Koagaon + Fecal Mutilation from MAGIC MOTHER. To be released December 2013!
3↩
It was St. Patricks Day. She was so adorably DRUUUUUUUUUUNK.
4↩
After a particularly heated discussion about James Taylor, he once professed that he’d prefer to listen to Nickelback, and we almost broke up.
5↩
Except for the toenails.