My Salad Blew off the Dinghy

My husband of four days called me at work this afternoon. "I just got here," he said. "It's really windy. There are white caps in the harbor. I don't think we should stay on board tonight." Then he added, "Your salad blew off the dinghy."

A head of red leaf lettuce, broccoli sprouts, sliced mushrooms...all flying off in the plastic bag over the lakeshore of downtown Chicago. Past Buckingham Fountain, past the orange-vested tourists on segways, around the bend of the Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium, rounding the Adler Planetarium, and off to who knows where. Gary, Indiana?

It's our effort to eat in and save money. In the year we dated, we frequented 4,500 of the 9,000 restaurants in Chicago. This alerted my provincial father. "I'd keep an eye out," he said. "Knows all the best restaurants, lives on a boat...probably got mafia ties."

My father's suspicions prompted me to email him Mark's cv, detailing more than a dozen years of an academic career in the health sciences. "Not a mafia guy," I assured him. "But just as strange."

In the first month we dated, I fell in love with the captain of the Mazurka, who lived on his boat year-round, wintering on the Chicago River, summering on Lake Michigan, with spectacular views of downtown Chicago, minus the congestion. During the winter months, he has a clear view of the Sears Tower, the only thing standing between them a remarkable plot of un-mowed, untended grass, the last piece of of undeveloped land in all of Chicago, where condo tenants who live in the beehive of River City let their dogs run free in the early evenings. When I started dating this river rat from the ultra-rural, upper-upper peninsula of Michigan, I marveled that he found his own place of nature in the third largest city in the country. When he took me out on the river for our first date, slicing between the cavernous walls of glass and steel, it amazed me that the city I had known for a decade could be so quiet, so private, so spacious.

I fell in love with him first because he loved nature, and could find it no matter where he lived.

And now, a little more than a year later, we are married. And I am going to live on his boat. Me, Hunter, and Leo: permission to come aboard for one city girl and two white, long-haired cats.

We may be entering treacherous waters.

Beginning two mornings after our wedding, when, for no explicable reason, the generator stopped working. Things like this sometimes happen: the refrigerator warms up, the xm radio fizzes out, the engine fills with water. Mark is good at figuring out how to fix things. But until he figures out if it's the filter or the glow plugs or the whole damn generator, with Mazurka tied to a can in Monroe Harbor, and no shore power, electricity, or hot water...we are staying at my apartment just a bit longer.