 I can't look at this and that's saying I love this picture. I just love this picture of her. That's Abigail Thomas and in her memoir, A Three Dog Night, Thomas is describing her life after her husband Rich is hit by a car and suffers a traumatic brain injury that basically transforms him from the man she loves to the man she married to someone she continues to love but also struggles with because he is a very many ways of different self that she has to work with. With Thomas we begin to see some of the identity concerns of middle-aged women and a middle-aged woman who has to very carefully consider the expectations for female identity and aging than the reality of her life. So my undergraduate, Blake Stanger, who is a teaching major at MSU is going to read from the book, This Is A Three Dog Life. I'm a teacher. Thank you. Yes. How's your love life? Someone asked me last winter, I haven't seen this person since the eighth grade. We went to Love Me Tender, the day it opened in 1956. It was a sort of date with her and her mother growing up. When the light stemmed he leaned over and said, this is probably when I should begin whispering sweet nothings in your ear. I've never heard the phrase sweet nothings and it charmed the hell out of me. Twenty minutes later Elvis appeared as a dot in a field and the whole audience began screaming. How's your love life? I suppose it was a fair question. I'm married. I answer, not adding buster because I don't think that's what he meant. Whatever he did mean he didn't pursue it but the subject was raised and I had to pick it over. Did he assume I was lonely? Did he think out to be out in the world prowling around for another partner? Even if I wanted to and I don't I couldn't face all the talking. Past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young and it certainly would come up. There's nothing I want to relive. Certainly not you. And as the voice had come, I'm in no hurry. I watched my dogs. They throw themselves into everything they do. Even their sleeping is wholehearted. They are waiting for a better tomorrow or looking back at their glory days following their example, I'm trying to stick to the present. I'm not stranded here. I know where I've been. I can conjure out details and bold hunts. Even former states of mind. I spent some of my salad days in the west side market and the long gone cathedral market. I flirted with butchers and cheese monkeys and the produce manager. There was a husband and wife. We used to have a drug store on the west side of Broadway in 2011. It was a small old-fashioned place and we always shopped there instead of the discount chain that it opened across the street. The owners were Eastern Europeans and their forearms were tattoos. Every evening they strolled out together the woman's cheeks, rosy, her silver hair held in place by beautiful columns. My memory puts them arm in arm. They were a shy, courteous couple. The husband bowed and slid. They have our eyes met. They walked and pulled dog. The drug store has been gone for probably 25 years and I can't remember what replaced it or even what part of the block it occupied. But theirs was the kind of marriage I wanted. So comfortable you probably didn't even have to talk. Rich and I don't make conversation in exchange for 10 bits. How well we slept. What was for breakfast? We were stripped down to our basic cells. No static, no irony, no nuance. Once in a while Rich said something that takes my breath away. I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite tugging at my stakes. He said one day I was a clear blue sky. He was lying in a hospital bed but his eyes were joyous. In some ways we were simply an old married couple catapulted into the wordless phase ahead of time. An old pal of mine used to have stole the virtues of basic body warmth in the days when I was more into the heat. But now I understand Rich and I sit together we hold hands we are warm-blooded creatures in a quiet space and that's all the communication we need. But I have to resist the impulse to create memories suitable for framing. I have to resist the impulse to preserve us at our most content. Rich is restless. Some days he can't sit still he's unsteady until getting to his feet. When we're together do you want a cup of coffee? Water? The bathroom? No, no, and no. Rich just needs to be moving and I ask myself what is the use in a destination anyway? Recently someone asked about my worst fears. What are they? I couldn't come up with anything. Instead of the fear you have to be able to imagine the future and I never think about the future anymore. It is no longer my destination. I don't want to have it happen, of course. I don't want to have a flat tire or get lost driving at night or be eaten by wild animals. I don't want to lose my mind or my livelihood. I don't want to forget why I parked the car or the names of my children but I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it as an old friend used to say. I did recently google fluid in the inner ear and worry briefly about obscure ways to go to death because my left ear was clicking. I had the fear and the clicking after a sushi deluxe with Claudette and a walk and roll in Woodstock. But as refuse, I don't have any. If you do so, says my sister Judy, I do not, I say. Then why can't you get my elevator? That's a phobia, I tell her. A phobia means fear, she says. Don't you know a little Greek? Maybe it's all semantics. My definition of fear is that it's a constant companion, a sidekick, riding you like a watch, going in and out of the days. I don't live like that anymore. The fact that I'm 63 has something to do with it. What I used to fear was growing old, not the apes and pains part or what I've done with my life part for the threat of illness, none of that. I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without the option of looking good. I had a piece of good luck. I married rich in my late 40s and was thus eased in the middle age while living with a man who approved of the way I looked. When after three years of marriage, I lamented the fact that I had prolonged a good deal of late and said, don't worry, I love it all. You can get as bad as you want. Then upon reflection, he had it sweetly as long as you can still get out from your chair. Besides, I'm okay alone. I don't always want to answer a question about why I'm coughing if I'm coughing. I like falling into return to a place lit by a glass of milk without being asked what I'm reading. I appreciate not being interrupted in the middle of thinking about nothing. Nobody shoes my dogs off the sofa objects to the three of them with sardine breath hoarding over the covers for bed at night. I like moving furniture around without anyone wishing that I wouldn't or noticing that I have. I like cooking or not thinking watching movies until 3 a.m. and no one the wiser watching movies on a spring day and no one the wiser to say nothing of the next. Getting back to the question how is my love life? Rich is my husband. We have been married 17 years. We fall asleep together on the couch trusting, comfortable and warm. That's my love life. It's all I want that I can have at any time. All I have to do is drive to the northeast senate. Pick up my husband and drive him home. But what with one thing and another my icy driveway, big snowstorms various colds. There were two months this winter when I couldn't. I chickened out every week afraid I wasn't strong enough to help him with the steps. Afraid of us both slipping and falling in the snow. When I was younger I never fell and if I did so what? Now when I'm real alone full of aches and pains and I watch myself being cautious of new territory my speciality is leaving, not looking. These days I pay attention. You can stumble uphill as easily as down ice comes in smooth and corrugated plastic bags are slippery underfoot a big dog can knock you to your knees. When I was young the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party closed the pretty china, the family silver the grown up jobs. The future was a land of its own and we couldn't wait to get there. Now if the youth wasn't great but it came with disadvantages I remember feeling that I was missing something really good that was going on somewhere else somewhere I wasn't I remember feeling life passed me by I remember impatience I don't feel that way now if something interesting is going on somewhere else good thank god I hope nobody calls me Sometimes it's all I can do to brush my teeth toothpaste is just too stimulating the future was also the place where bad stuff waited in ambush my children were embarking on their futures in fragile vessels and I trembled I wanted to improve obstacles smoothed their way I wanted to change their childhoods I needed to be right all of the time I want them to listen to me learn from my mistakes and save themselves a lot of food well now I know I can control my tongue my temper my appetite but that's it I have no effect on weather traffic or luck I can't make good things happen I can't keep anybody safe I can't influence the future and I can't fix up the past what a relief