Waving to the Circus Leaving Town

The volume, for the moment, has dialed down. Three weeks after the Iowa State Supreme Court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry was unconstitutional, and five days after those marriage licenses began being issued, the deafening euphoria from the one side has settled into a wide grin, while the apoplectic outrage on the other has focused into teeth-gritting mutters. The week began with plenty of media attention -- from all over the world -- and ended today with a story about out-of-staters filling a bus to Iowa City for a group ceremony and a few hours of wedded bliss before returning home to Missouri where their licenses would be worth about as much as the subscription cards that fall out of magazines. In between we have been subjected to various opinion pieces in the paper and incendiary letters to the editor (I wrote one myself, though it didn't make the cut), and human interest stories on the 6 o'clock news.

Gradually, though, life has moved on. This is, after all, Iowa. A wise and seasoned matter-of-factness dominates most of our days here that isn't disrupted for very long. Five days into marriage equality, the sky hasn't fallen. The rivers rose but didn't overflow, five inches of rain notwithstanding; the trees still blossomed, the banks still opened, no one turned into a pillar of salt, and no sinkhole opened up to transport the state directly to the Hell that some had predicted. If the company that I keep is any representative sampling, heterosexuals have discerned no change in the relative value or significance of their own marriages, and most have already shifted their attentions to the more mundane business of daily living.

I'm not surprised. It reminds me of the distressed conversation I pressed one evening at church camp several decades ago with a wise mentor after the particularly glorious religious experience of the day before hadn't sustained itself throughout the day following. "You can't live on a mountaintop forever," he sagely observed. "Among other things, your body couldn't take it."

Life, in other words, is not one long succession of flash points, nor is it an endless constellation of "issues." I know some people who try to make it that way, but theirs is a tiny audience. Most of us pour our breakfast cereal, pump our gas, pay our bills, brush our teeth, and pull on our pajamas without much sense of drama. Sure, we can get worked up, but few of us stay that way, and most who do are simply annoying. Life is too short for that -- or, as another wise friend once countered, "Life is too long for that."

I'm sure there will be more letters to the editor, and television stations won't let the sensation drop without a fight. But most of us here will simply go on living -- agreeing or disagreeing, but with more pressing things to do, not making a fuss one way or the other.