And I think to myself, and I think to myself, what a, well, what a world, capable of giving safe harbor to the worst among us, and capable of wrapping me up in a breeze too sweet for words or chords as I stagger, a mere handful of days into my ‘50’s, around the safe, dark streets of my hometown.
&&&
My ‘40’s went by faster than I could have imagined, and they went a lot different than I thought they would.
When the decade dawned, my beloved wife pleaded with me to lose some weight, to take better care of myself.
“You’re forty now. You have two kids and another on the way. You’re not a kid anymore. I don’t want you to leave me here alone with three kids. I want a lot of years with you.”
I never could say no to her, hell, that’s how I wound up with two kids and another one on the way, so I made some changes.
I cut down on the craft beers, I started eating better, I started exercising every day.
Little by little, the weight started coming off. At first it wasn’t really noticeable, and I would get discouraged, but she insisted she could feel a difference, and so I soldiered on, and seven or eight months in, other people started noticing.
And my clothes started noticing.
Jeans I could once barely jam into now required a belt turned in several notches. Old shirts I once loved but had given up on suddenly fit, and, a couple of months later, started looking a little big on me.
I’d power walk for an hour, sometimes two, and upon finishing, would come in through the back door, sweat on my neck and my breath heavy.
I was doing it.
My ‘40’s were off to a roaring start, and I started wondering what else I could start working on. Finish that novel I’d written two hundred pages of a decade earlier? Finish that screenplay I’d had dozens of index cards on? Take my political activism to a new level, find some sort of way to really get at the problems of our times?
I knew I had a big decade in front of me.
&&&
And then she went and fucking died on me, a year and a half into a decade I had big plans for.
The nerve of her, I would sometimes think.
I’d listened to her pleas. I thought about her lying alone some night, alone with three kids, and me in an early grave, and when those thoughts came, I’d find one more hill to climb, one more mile to walk, one less beer to drink, one less piece of my homemade lasagna to eat.
The nerve of her.
&&&
And so a decade seemingly filled with promise quickly went sour.
Her death came with almost no warning.
One of her ears seemed to be blocked.
She wasn’t worried at first.
We’d gone across the Atlantic a number of times, because her father had gotten sick. Pancreatic cancer.
So we thought maybe the ear had gotten plugged coming back down on one of those flights.
A year went by, a year and a half, she had Riley, I worked like mad on the 2006 elections, the good guys won, we looked around at houses to buy.
Her mother got cancer, too, but in her case, they caught in time.
On my 41st birthday, she was back in the old country with her mother as her mother had a major surgery. Incredibly, the youngest two of the three got some sort of retrovirus, they both wound up in the hospital. I tried to hide it from her but she kept calling the house and she finally beat the confession out of my father. She read me the riot act when she finally got me on the phone, but I remained convinced I had done the right thing.
I had no clue that it would be the last birthday I would spend with her.
&&&
Eventually, I recovered, or recovered enough. I smelled the spring again, I knew the lilac would bloom.
I wasn’t what you would call on the market, I’d refused entreaties from family and friends, refused an offer of phone numbers, said no to a couple of direct asks.
Truth be told, after a few years raising my kids alone, my ‘40’s drifting by in relative peace, in the rhythm of the double-stroller I pushed for miles every day, me drifting off into thought while they babbled to each other in a language only they will ever understand: after a few years of that, I thought, I kind of like running the show on my own. I started to see the answer to the question I used to ask Nana, who was also widowed young.
“Nana, how come you never got married again?” I’d ask.
She’d say something along the lines of, it’s a long story. and I’d let go of it.
And finally, I had my answer, though it wasn’t an answer that was worth the sky-high price I paid for it.
&&&
I’d gone to the city the weekend before, met up with some dear friends at a bar down the street from Penn Station. Some promotion was going on and the promoters kept on giving us shots of whiskey. Much backslapping and hugging ensued.
The one non-drinker in the group drove us over the bridges and into Montclair for a concert by a band we all loved. When their set opened and the singer came out, smiled, and pumped his fist at us, I thought to myself, alright. Alright. I am going to make it.
&&&
The next week, I darted into a coffee shop before my son’s 5th-grade basketball game. I was tired, and needed a caffeine boost.
The place, one I frequented almost daily by this point, was virtually empty.
Down at the end of the ordering aisle, I saw a woman who looked like she was waiting for something.
I know her, I thought.
It was the first time since Lauren died that I had any sort of what you might call a romantic inkling.
I decided to say hello to her. What’s the worst that could happen, I thought. I watched my wife die; getting dissed ain’t gonna be anywhere near as bad as that.
She was wearing a pair of jeans and an I.W.W. t-shirt. What could go wrong?
We vaguely knew each other through a mutual friend.
“Hi. You’re mutual friend’s name friend, right?”
“Yeah.”
We talked for a good while. She ate a small bowl of soup as I drank a large Sumatra. She told me about her sister losing a great job in the city, how crushed she was. I made some jokes about maybe looking for a job someday. I didn’t want her to think I was sitting around on my now-slightly fat ass.
“Well, I thought staying home with the kids was the right move under the circumstances.”
I wasn’t sure she knew what the hell I was talking about.
“Yeah, mutual friend told me you were home with them. I’m really sorry about what happened. That must have been hard.”
Yeah.
This is one of those situations were no one really knows what to say, and it always gets uncomfortable, but we moved on and next thing I knew, a half hour had gone by.
“I better get going, my son will be mad if I miss his game.”
&&&
Mutual friend arranged a double-date. It took a while, I had to break in a babysitter and all that.
The double-date didn’t go well, at least in my opinion. Mutual friend had brought a guy with her, and I assumed he had some interest in mutual friend, but as the night wore on, he appeared to have an interest in Sheila, and it seemed to me the interest might have been mutual, so I took off.
Sheila got to me before I left.
“I got some Juicy Fruit. Why don’t you come back in and we can watch the Olympics and chew some Juicy Fruit.”
I told her I needed to get home.
Mutual friend texted me Sheila’s number when I got home.
“Call her. Make plans to hang out next week.”
I did as I was told, but my expectations could not have been lower. I was happy to be out, happy to have a babysitter finally, but I was pretty convinced she had a thing for the other guy.
Wrong again.
We had a grand old time, and before I knew it, we started having grand old times once a week, and then more.
&&&
And now we’ve been married for five years.
She asked me, a couple of months back, how I wanted to observe my impending 50th.
I said I thought going away alone, no kids, just us, even for one night, well, I couldn’t think of anything better than that.
A week or so later, she told me she’d booked us a room at some B&B in the Mid-Hudson Valley.
&&&
Sunday, my fiftieth birthday, came on sunny and very, very hot.
She told me she had booked us a winery tour for 2:00, but we got on the road late, and it became apparent we wouldn’t make it by 2:00.
“Let’s bag the winery,” I said, as we headed on down. “We don’t need to do that.”
She was adamant about us getting there.
I figured she'd booked us something and had paid for it in advance, and, since money is too tight to mention these days, she didn’t want the cash to go to waste.
“Look,” I said, “if we gotta eat some money on this, so be it. It’s my birthday.”
She insisted we get to the winery.
&&&
There was a point in my late ‘30’s when I used to listen to this song over and over again. A friend had given me this CD of Richard Thompson covers. I listened to “A Heart Needs A Home” a lot after one of my aunts had died. At the funeral’s after-party, my father made me go over and say something to my uncle.
He looked say, empty, wordless, riven with grief. I had not the slightest idea that I’d know how he felt in about four years. I shook his hand and told him I was sorry for his loss. He smiled and looked at me, and by the look in his eyes I could see he had gone to some planet I didn’t know existed. I gave him empty words an he gave me a vacant smile, and we went on our way.
The memory of his face haunted me for a long time, and during that haunting, “A Heart Needs A Home” kept me company, and then, for no real reason, I pivoted to “Turning of the Tide.” I felt young, alive, almost jumping out of my skin. I convinced myself I would not die young. The song gave me energy and hope. I would figure it out.
&&&
Although I drove, and although we hit traffic and at times felt certain we had gotten lost, we pressed on toward the winery.
“Maybe they have a 3:00 tour,” she said.
We finally found the place. Pulled in, parked.
She grabbed my hand.
“C’mon,” she said. “I have something to show you.”
We walked through the lot, up a long set of stairs, and onto a patio.
“SURPRISE!” I heard people yell.
I looked around: my best friends in the world stood all around me.
&&&
We sat under the trees, some of us drinking too much wine. They close at 5:00 and we followed each other, over some very windy roads, back to the B&B. We had the place to ourselves. We brought food in. We made cocktails, drank beer and wine. We got our celebration on. At one point during the proceedings, I interrupted everyone to make an announcement:
“This is the best birthday of my life.”
&&&
I don’t know why 50 matters more than 49; it makes no sense, but it does.
I don’t want to know what’s gonna happen in my 50’s: I’ve known a lot of people die up in that decade, and I know I could be next.
But I don’t wanna be next.
I have a lot to live for: kids, and my Sheila, beyond description, our love a work of art granted to us for no apparent reason.
The grandiose dreams I dreamt at 41 or so, well, they died of natural causes, somewhere in my late ‘40’s.
You get to the point where no matter how fucked up the world is. no matter how fucked up your own life is, you just wanna hang around as long as possible.
I am lucky.
It is 2:55 in the morning, and if I want to go out and smoke a cigarette, I can do so, with very liitle fear of being disturbed by the local constabulary.
I don’t know what my ‘50’s will hold: I just hope that I will survive them, that they are a little less turbulent than my ‘40’s, and that we move that much closer to the day when every last person in this country has the ability to celebrate the miracle of living through an entire half-century the way that I have.
