Mr. Molly

The Sun to My Moon

This past weekend, The Telegraph magazine ran the first excerpt of MORE in the UK. (There was an actual bidding war for these rights. How nutso is that?!) The folks from the magazine scheduled a photographer to come to the house, and asked if Stewart would be willing to participate.

“Sure,” said Stew. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

 “Maybe a half-hour or so?” I guessed.

This was a slight miscalculation.

Three and a half hours later, we still weren’t finished. Not only did the photographer want Stew in almost every image, she had a specific vision, especially for the primary shot. My job was to stand in profile, looking back towards the camera, reminding me that muscles around the eyes exist and can in fact become very fatigued. Stewart was directed to stand behind me, looking straight ahead. The goal was to meld the two of us in Picasso-esque unity.

“That’s it,” she said, encouraging me to step even closer to Stew, and then inch myself forward. “Your face should eclipse Stewart’s.”

To eclipse. To cover, obscure, hide, conceal. One heavenly body darkening the light of the other.

Or, the metaphoric meaning: to become more important than something else.

That night, Stewart and I drove to a concert with a couple of friends. One of them jokingly asked him, “So how does it feel to be Mr. Molly?” Although our friend didn’t know the details of our day, it felt like an apt time to raise this question.

“I actually don’t mind it,” said Stewart.

I believe he was telling the truth. During that photo shoot, Stew made a game of every awkward pose. With his nose touching my ear for long minutes at a time, he whispered things like “I can smell what you hear,” cracking me up and ruining the shot. When he was instructed to place his head on my shoulder as I looked into the camera, his body immediately went slack and he began to fake snore. When we took a break to re-position the lights, Stewart stole kisses and squeezed my butt. We laughed and smooched so often that the photographer nixed one idea she’d had for a portrait of the two of us standing across the room from one another. The distance felt artificial, she explained.

In the interviews and podcasts I’ve been doing for MORE over the past several months, I’ve talked about Stewart and our marriage in a variety of ways. Sometimes, I’m talking about a dynamic that existed between us years ago but has long since faded. Sometimes, I’m sharing a discovery we made after the time frame covered in the book—or even since it was published. Because relationships—at least the ones that I want to be a part of—are not static. They are alive in the way that the humans who enter them are living, evolving creatures, always in flux. Sometimes relationships are dominated by anger, sometimes by sorrow, sometimes by joy. But this isn’t necessarily a cause for concern. As Rilke reminds us, “Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Eclipses are also temporary, the result of constant motion. Celestial bodies are in a continually changing relationship to one another, taking turns, a choreography in which no single dancer hogs the stage: “A solar eclipse… happens because the Moon slips between the Sun and Earth. Likewise, a lunar eclipse… happens because Earth gets in the way of the Sun, blocking its light from directly reaching the Moon.”* This is why solar and lunar eclipses come in pairs**, alternating every fortnight, stretching backwards and forwards across time.  

This is often the rhythm in a marriage, too. One person steps aside while the other one shines. Or maybe, like an eclipse, this is just how it appears to the Earth-bound observer, peering at the sky with specialty glasses. Really, both the sun and moon are shining as brightly as they ever did, going through the steps of their continuous dance—unworried if anyone is watching.

*from Our Moon, a book that auspiciously shares MORE’s publication date

**The Solar Eclipse on April 8^th, 2024 has been dominating the news, but a Lunar Eclipse will also be occurring on March 25^th