Hanging Up For Good -- Homage to The Wire

The Wire ended last night, and I'm feeling really sad.

"It's just a television show," Hubby shrugged as I lamented the sudden hole in my life. Then he turned away to wash the dishes, and I swear he swatted a tear out of the corner of his eye.

The Wire, as Hubby well knows, is not just a television show. It's the best television show ever. It's a rich novel he and I read together, carried along over the years of our relationship. We worked as a team to figure it out, squinting with concentration as we tried to follow Lester's logic. We'd pretzel together, my face buried in his chest whenever I worried that Bubbles was going to get hurt. Together we rewound every bit of dialog Omar uttered and tried to translate it word for word, rarely with success. Often I'd laugh at something Bunc mumbled around the cigar fixed in his mouth and Hubby would turn to me to explain. "I don't know what he said," I'd admit. "It was just funny."

I'll cop to getting a tad too attached to some books so when the end came I felt the same kind of sadness I experienced every year as I cleaned out my college dorm room and flew home to Los Angeles -- lonely, a bit adrift, vaguely displaced. I still remember crying the hot summer night I finished And Ladies of the Club . . . , though I can no longer recall a single detail of character or plot. I can easily retrieve the choking sensation that rose up through my chest all three times I finished Gone with the Wind, and the last time was over 25 years ago. Even the end of Harry Potter left me a little bit misty eyed, even though my attachment to the series was so fraught with ambivalence that I spent much of my time trying to figure out what past events the characters kept referring to.

I am a firm believer in the humanity of well drawn characters. As they speed toward their fate in the last few pages of a book to interrupt would seem an injury to them. I nearly broke up with Hubby the first time he tried to engage me in conversation during the last 25 pages of Straight Man. I'll put a book aside and stare at the seat back in front of me during the last half hour of a flight if I think I might be forced to deplane with only 6 pages to go. And it goes without saying that I've stayed up way too late on way too many occasions soaking up the end of even mediocre novels.

But The Wire. Bubbles and Lester and Randy (oh, that smile). Not my friends, exactly, me being a clean-living white girl in a small, not terribly gritty city where I can indulge my deep desire to avoid seeing pain inflicted on anyone, especially an animal. I love these characters because I don't see a bit of myself in them -- unlike the characters in novels, to whom I grant voices, cadences, emotions that arise from something inside myself. I admire them because they are smarter than I am, speak more eloquently, live more vividly.

Mostly, though, I think it's possible I love them and their story because Hubby and I became acquainted with them as we became acquainted with each other.

Season Two of The Wire began just as we began living together. Neither of us had seen Season One, but that didn't matter any more than the fact that we hadn't even known each other when it was on and still didn't know much about each others' lives at the time. We didn't have the first clue what was going on for about half the season, but it was so good we watched anyhow. Not unlike our relationship.

By the start of Season Three we were newlyweds, with a history behind us to build upon. I had bought Hubby the DVD of Season One for Christmas, and we were now caught up on the story. It was both comfortable and thrilling -- returning to a plot we now sort of understood and continuing our own with the same uncertain sense that we didn't understand it as well as we hoped.

Season Four -- the really devastating one about the middle school kids -- rolled around in the middle of my pregnancy. Maybe I can blame the fact that for weeks after it ended I stumbled around the house moaning "Randy" on the hormones. I don't know what Hubby's excuse was.

And now the end has come. What does that mean for our marriage? I suppose it's a good thing that nothing was really resolved -- who expected it would be? -- and that life continues. Ours will too, even without those coveted Sunday nights watching really good tv (as opposed to old episodes of Reno 911 or even new ones of The Colbert Report).

And who knows? Maybe something just as good will come along one day. Or maybe we'll just be left with all the good things that happened to the tune of our Wire addiction -- our love for each other, our marriage, our child, and the beauty of being able to feel the loss of true art.