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    Feral City: Scenes from a Second Marriage
    Feral City: Scenes from a Second Marriage
    Feral City: Scenes from a Second Marriage
    Ebook62 pages48 minutes

    Feral City: Scenes from a Second Marriage

    By Alison Luterman

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    About this ebook

    In Feral City, poet and essayist Alison Luterman combines her talents to explore a topic near and dear to her heart: love partnerships. These five chapters explore her own experience going through an early and exciting marriage, divorcing, spending many years alone, and then opening up to a new partner and marrying again at age 50. The stories are set in Luterman’s funky Oakland, California, neighborhood, and tackle the tough and tender issues of relationships, from fighting to making up to figuring out whose turn it is to feed the abandoned kittens in the basement. An entertaining collection, full of honesty, empathy, and humor.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShe Writes Press
    Release dateJul 26, 2014
    ISBN9781940838618
    Feral City: Scenes from a Second Marriage
    Author

    Alison Luterman

    Alison Luterman has written three books of poetry, The Largest Possible Life (which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize), See How We Almost Fly (which won the Pearl Poetry Prize), and Desire Zoo. Luterman’s personal essays have appeared in Salon, the Sun magazine, the L.A. Review, and the New York Times’ Modern Love section. She has written half a dozen plays, including a musical about kidney transplantation. Saying Kaddish with My Sister, her first full-length play, was produced in 2008 by the Jewish Ensemble Theater of West Bloomfield, Michigan. Luterman has been an adjunct instructor in the Writing and Consciousness MFA program at New College and has taught poetry and memoir at Holy Names College in Oakland, the Writing Salon in Berkeley, and the Esalen and Omega Institutes. Check out Alisonluterman.com for more information.

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      Book preview

      Feral City - Alison Luterman

      Introduction

      This book is for anyone over 40 who has feared she is too old, too damaged, too cynical, too independent, too needy, not pretty enough, not thin enough, or fill-in-the-blank-other-reason to find love. All of those things and more were true about me. This knowledge drove me to despair.

      This book is also for anyone wrestling with the wonder and the aggravation of living intimately with another; perhaps someone who appears to be of the same species as yourself, who may even speak the same language, but who is decidedly. Not. You. Because you have your own adorable, correct, and unimpeachable way of doing things, and this—whoever-he-or-she-is who has taken up residence in your bed and your life—is Different.

      If I could jump through my computer screen to yours and hold your hand, I would. If I could grab you by the shoulders and press my forehead against your own, if I could whisper in your ear, I would say: love is possible. Yes, even for you. Especially for you. And it’s worth it. Worth all of the misunderstandings and the work of translation, worth the occasional hurt feelings and adapting and adjusting our creaky selves to the needs of another; worth the ride.

      I got married for the second time at the tender age of 50, when I was set in my ways, scarred from years of awkward dating, and scared of getting hurt again. I had been essentially single for 15 years, ever since my first marriage ended, and I was more than a little feral.

      Luckily my husband Lee is good with wild things. He gently, quietly, hung tight through the emotional storms that came when I realized I had actually committed myself. That I was in it for good, for better or for worse, with all the terror that brought up. We’d uncover some big difference in our tastes or desires and I’d freak out, and he’d be steadfast. Then I’d get over myself and it would be his turn to have a meltdown.

      It’s scary to love someone at our age. We know how things end. Marriages splinter under the weight of cultural differences, crash and burn like speeding race cars, or wither in the fields like lettuce during a drought. The year we married was the year the economy tanked, inaugurating the steepest recession in 80 years and sending both our careers into unexpected free fall. Then came menopause. Oh yeah. Good times.

      Lee and I have had epic battles over tiny things and not-so-tiny things, most of which boiled down to fear. Fear of loss. Fear of change. Fear of giving up our personal power and getting hurt once again. God bless everyone who helped us see the forest for the trees. I’m talking here about the longer-married, about my girlfriend who listened patiently as I exclaimed, I do so hate him! until I noticed her biting the inside of her own cheeks to keep from laughing. The fellow writer at a conference who regaled me with tales of his battles with his wife (We went to the beach together and fought about sand.). And the friend who, when I sighed and said, It’s not fun right now, looked at me sharply and said, It’s not supposed to always be fun.

      God bless you all (including a couple of skilled professionals), and please forgive me for being so annoyingly naive. It’s not easy to figure out love in this age of Internet everything, when a million intriguing strangers lie waiting to be called up on the computer, just an itchy fingertip away. And it never has been and never will be easy to reveal one’s wounds and brokenness to someone else, all that messy human glory. Cats, both feral and tame, kept showing up our new life, and maybe they were metaphors for our own shy, wild hearts as we domesticated each other.

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