Thursday, May 29, 2025

An Atypical Lifestyle

 

I was recently asked, seemingly with some surprise, about my slightly less than mainstream lifestyle. In fact the phrase “renowned and brilliant engineer living in a barn” was used, follow immediately by “how the hell did you get a woman to keep you company?!”, or something along those lines.

OK, first off, if anything, infamous is probably a more accurate word than renowned, and I doubt even that is the case. The reality is more along the lines of “who?”.  And brilliant? That’s just wrong! Unless it was being said with a dripping dose of sarcasm, as in “Oh, that’s just brilliant!”, while looking down at the results of a dropped paint can that just exploded all over the place.

But OK, it’s true that I was, in a previous life, an engineer and that I found a partner that, for the past 20 years has lived in a barn with me.


More specifically, we have a 380 sq. ft. space that is split between a single multi-purpose room plus a bathroom


tucked in the corner of a 1500 sq. ft. barn.



This is where we cook, sleep, eat, and spend our evenings. (My sister calls it the transformer room.)

But that’s not the whole story.

The rest of the barn is my workshop where I spend a lot of time

and The Wife has a separate 400 sq. ft. barn with a 16 x 8 foot deck that is her workspace, where she also spends a lot of her time. And we also have 14 fenced, isolated, rolling (three ridges and two valleys with no flat spots in-between), wooded acres to wander as well. So it’s not like we’re “in” a single room all day.

So how did I get woman to keep me company in these circumstances? Well it hasn’t always been easy! For either of us.

The Wife and I met at a dinner party in 1982. She thought I was really boring and wondered why I had been invited in the first place. I didn’t think much about her one way or the other, being more concerned with how uncomfortable I am at social events and wondering why I had agreed to come in the first place. But working different divisions of the same company we kept running into each other,


The Wife, The Daughter (mine), and me the day we made it official

and four years later we shacked up, a year after that we made it official in the eyes of the IRS.

In many ways we make no sense together at all. I’m a fairly active person and mildly aggressive about maintaining my physical conditioning, she’s more sedentary and food-oriented. (When we travel together we don’t go from here to there, we go from restaurant to restaurant until we eventually get there!) In the morning I can’t wait to get up and out the door into the open air where I pretty much stay until sunset regardless of the weather, she loves her air-conditioning. I’ve hiked several thousand miles of wilderness trails, some of them pretty hairy, requiring a certain sense of adventure and a degree of nimble-footedness, her threshold for adventure is more along the lines of buying a new brand of salad dressing, and she can break a leg stepping off the sidewalk – something she’s done twice.

But there are ways we make sense together.

In slightly different ways both of us are, to put it mildly, uneasy around people. My particular form of autism (Not that we knew how to label ourselves until recently) makes it uncomfortable for me to be around and deal with people. I’m agitated while trying to deal with social norms I just don’t understand and therefore am really bad at. The Wife’s form of social atypical-ness is similar but slightly different. She can play the socializing game much better than me when she has to, but people scare the crap out of her. She is very distrustful of pretty much everyone and for her, being around people borders on terrifying. Either way, interaction with people is exhausting for both of us.

Even though we didn’t have names for what we were beck then, we knew early on that sharing these traits actually made us bad for each other, feeding off of each other’s social issues like a sound-system  squealing out of control, and together we were, not only feeding off of each other’s social issues but also creating a codependency. And in case we missed the implications of this before, they were made clear on Halloween of 1984.

Pretending we were normal people we had spent a couple weeks assembling our costumes for a party, and on the day got dressed up, drove to the location, parked, shut the car off, watched a few people going into the venue, started the car, and drove away to spend the evening on our own. But we made the conscious decision that, despite this, us together, taking care of each other and creating little sanctuaries for ourselves where possible in the midst of the social chaos, was preferable to us going our separate ways and trying to live full time in a world we didn’t quite fit into.

We also share a similar, muted, consumerist’s ethic. We aren’t afraid to spend money when it makes sense. We both have rather high-end vehicles with all the bells and whistles that make driving easier, more comfortable, and safer. But on the other-hand, we built both barns, our atypical home, and the well-house, by hand, on weekends, for cash (Which is a big reason I was able to retire at 58 and finally get away from people on a daily basis). I own two sets of footwear, slippers for evenings on our raw concrete floor and a pair of hiking shoes for everything else. The Wife never wears trousers and owns three skirts. When one or another of those wears out to the point of indecency she gets the sewing machine out and makes another one.

It hasn’t always been smooth. As is true for most everybody, ours is not the well-groomed garden path of a Hallmark movie. Our road is rutted and potholed, has sharp turns with no guardrails, exhausting uphill slogs and terrifying descents, but somehow we’ve managed to make it work. For 40 some years and counting, together we’ve been crafting the complex and ever changing choreography of a partnership.

She plans and preps most of our meals (in a kitchenette with a hotplate, a countertop convection oven, no microwave, but an 18” dishwasher!), I reset tripped breakers, sort the recycling, and take the compost out. She keeps track of birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays and ensures the appropriate cards, gifts, and notes get to where they’re supposed to be, when they’re supposed to be, I keep an eye on the finances and ensure the bills are paid. She gets on-line and places orders for groceries and household goods for curbside pickup (so we don’t have to go in and mingle with people), I drive. She assembles our evening snack while I shower. I convert our space from livingroom to bedroom while she brushes her teeth. She changes out the toilet paper roll, I change out the roll of paper towels.

We’ve had our ups and downs, our bad times, OK times, and great times, and will very likely continue to have all of those, but we’ve been around the block enough now to know that we are one hell of a lot better off together than not.

I suspect that, no matter how much people, the social animals that we (the collective we) are with our desperate, evolutionary need to fit into the pack, would like to think otherwise, atypical is actually the norm of the world. If that’s the case The Wife and I fit right in.

10 comments:

  1. By god! I knew you could do it!

    This is the mushiest of mushies and I'm sending it on to several other iconoclasts who recognize that atypical is normal.

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  2. There’s a lot to digest there but also a lot that I can relate towards. Julia and I are opposites in many respects. She has had a lot of people ask how in the world we ended up together. But…Julia is about as extroverted as a person can be.

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    1. That's probably a healthier mix than a pair of introverts pairing up. Just read an article (https://nicenews.com/humanity/why-small-talk-big-importance/) about the importance of small-talk, even if it scares the crap out of you. - I'm not buying it!

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  3. From the man I know and have met in person with twice, even dined with after a hike .... this post is just unbelievable. An photos of his domicile to boot ??? ? Can't be. Is that you Greg? It WAS to see your place. Totally unexpected to read about all of that. Is it the green candy? BTW ... all these questions are asked in a jokingly manner.

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    1. I think those damn head-shrinkers at the hospital slipped me a micky or something! Whats happening to me?!

      (Notice that none of the photos are tagged and the spacial relationships of the buildings are not reveled, making a satellite-search very complex!)

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  4. Greg,

    Didn't anyone slip you a mickey. You've been doing your thing long enough to reap its benefits which, as far as I can tell, is secure your anonymity. But look what's happened? The same few people you trusted are still here. And we're excited that you're back. There's not the slightest hint of threat, derision or castigation. We're still trustworthy.

    There aren't many of us out here. You've acknowledged it yourself when you've described walking the length of a campground and the looks you get.

    But you've come through a major crisis. It may help you see that those few of us who've found you, who you can trust, are eager to know how you've been affected by this massive shift in your well-being.

    I've started a book on it. The thesis is that as males we're given the opportunity to engage with our emotions in ways previously proscribed. The nearness of death sets us free.

    As individuals we have unique experiences. The hospice nurses tell me it's diff for everyone. But coming face-to-face with mortality would - one would hope - engender some thought and maybe even behavioral change.

    It's not a mickey, it's stepping into real life. And there are a few of us out here waving, welcoming you and me....jumping up & down and telling HHHUUURRRAAYY!!!

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  5. Oh crap! I'm the guy that stands at the back of the room during wedding, even leaving the front-row seat between Mom and my sister empty during my brother's wedding. I certainly don't know how to be in a parade having people jump up and down around me! And please! Could you keep the noise down?

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    1. Certainly...certainly. Sorry about that. It's just, you know, we thought you were DEAD! And now here you are. So we thought a little confetti and stuff was in order.

      Now that you're back you must have some tales to tell. Like, ummm, didjuh see the white light? Or, will you ever recover from the urinary catheterization?

      You gotta unnerstan'....I couldn't uh never endured what you've been through. So there's a large measure of awe.

      I know it's a lot to ask but it's for my book. Here you are, this....this OUTLIER (like myself, but diff) who's come through what HAS to be a life-changing experience and I'm starting a book on what it's like to approach death and think you could possibly make a contribution to -- or even BE -- a chapter.

      It's maybe too much for the Blogger comments section, but you're doing a good job so far.

      But I'll put the tuba and kazoos away.

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