i never saw her coming.
twenty five years old and looking not much more than half of that, and i knew, just knew, i had some sort of magnificent future laid out in front of me somewhere, i just had to walk into it: i felt certain that i would, just didn't know when.
so i waited.
second semester of grad school, studying toward a master's in english...thought maybe i'd get a doctorate and try and find a job teaching college some day, but that was just a vague notion. honestly, i enrolled in the program out of boredom, i'd tired of writing about town council and school board meetings for the troy paper.
i couldn't find an even mildly interesting and decently paid job in the lethargic early '90's upstate ny economy, so i thought, what the hell, why not go to school, figured i might meet some like-minded people, people who liked to laugh and read and who had lefty politics and who thought the pixies kicked ass.
maybe i'd meet a cool woman to boot. wasn't having much luck in that department, what with nothing more than an unrequited love on my recent ledger.
&&&&
i sat sullenly in the back of my classes the first semester, i don't know why. didn't talk to a soul. a sullen boy posing as some sort of silent complicated loner, bullshit, yeah, but in our youth we seem to try out various personalities until we find one that fits, and that's the one i tried on as i started out my life as a grad student.
in that second semester i met this guy, scott, or rather, he met me. the opposite of sullen, downright boisterous, talkative, hyper almost, like a ten year old who'd drunk a little too much soda, mouth always running, and on the first day of some class or other he sat down next to me and started talking to me like he already knew me.
a week or two in to the new semester and he started working me over, c'mon, come out with us, a bunch of us go out to this bar ralph's every thursday night (a great name for a bar, i thought, since in my undergrad days we all used the term "ralph" to denote drunken vomiting), no, c'mon, dollar pints until midnight, we have a good time, a bunch of us go, awesome jukebox there and they have a bumper pool table, we have fun, c'mon, c'mon.
i demurred, repeatedly, but he kept at it.
so on thursday, march fifth, nineteen ninety two, there i stood, at about eight-thirty, nine o'clock at night, out on lark street, just outside the doors to amazing wok, staring out at the neon signs and the rain-slicked pavement, eating broccoli with garlic sauce with a plastic fork from a white quart-sized take-out container, thinking, yeah, maybe i'll head over to that bar tonight, why not, what the fuck else will i do tonight anyway, head home to the 'rents' place, open a bag of doritos, and watch seinfeld? why not go out?
it seemed an insignificant decision, about as life-altering as answering "wheat" when asked by a diner waitress, what kinda toast ya want, hon, wheat or white?
&&&&
about ten o'clock i opened the door to the bar. not a clue to my name that by opening that door i'd crossed my own little rubicon.
i opened the door and looked around. a decent enough place i though, divey yet with a bit of atmosphere, peanut shells all over the floor, exposed brick walls, sufficiently dim lighting, a long mirror behind the bar, plenty of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and something good, can't remember what, blaring from the juke.
i opened the door and looked around for scott but i didn't see him, but i did see someone else, a woman wearing a black turtleneck underneath a black leather jacket, sporting long wavy red hair and flashing deep blue eyes. i thought of the line from the richard thompson song, "red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme", i gave her a long look and then noticed her looking up, right at me, shit, nabbed in the act, must be rusty, she wasn't checking me out, too, was she?
it all turned out ok, i sat down at her table when i saw some guy who i'd spoken to a bit in another class, and the scott came over, and she said to me, you look exactly like this guy from my hometown, and when she said it i noticed she had an english accent, and i thought it kind of interesting that i looked exactly like some guy from another country, especially since i had no english blood in me.
&&&&
at the end of that night we all kind of scattered in various directions and me and scott wound up conversing on the corner of madison and new scotland, outside of ralph's. i admitted, with the help of several of those dollar pints, that i was glad i came out, i'd met a bunch of people, had a good time, it sure beat the shit outta seinfeld and doritos in my folks' living room.
he looked over at the red-haired girl and that guy who i sort of knew and said to me, they make a good couple, don't ya think? i thought, well, i dunno either of them well enough to make that call, but thank god i didn't shame myself by asking her for her number or something while we were all sat around that table.
somehow, against the longest of odds, against anything i could have possibly imagined while stood talking out on that street corner that night, i wound up married to the red-haired girl and best friends with the other guy.
&&&&
i had a serious obsession with a short story writer named raymond carver at the time. read everything he ever published, several times over. somewhere along the line he wrote, or maybe said in an interview, but i think he wrote it in a story:
"everything you do has consequences, brother."
i thought then that i knew what he meant. thought he was talking about the big stuff, the big decisions, the real choices, love or hate, cut and run or tough it out. but now i wonder if maybe he meant, it's all big stuff, every breath of it, maybe he meant, sometimes the choice between the wheat or the white is a choice that will change the course of your life.
&&&&
i always knew i had it good, always knew i had beaten the odds. i have my faults but i will give myself this, i always felt a deep gratitude for my luck, for my place: of all the billions of people that have ever walked through this world, i had it better than almost all of them. born into a wealthy nation, into a loving family of a mother and a father and two sisters and a brother, always with a warm bed to sleep in and enough to eat, and then i grew up and eventually found a love many can only dream of.
somehow, as silly as it sounds, i thought that gratitude might protect me. oh, i knew that eventually, either me or lauren would get sick and die, leaving the other of us to trudge through life alone. i'd lived such a charmed life, though, i never expected that to happen so soon.
but it did. my luck ran out, way sooner than i thought it would, i lost the center of my life, my wife, my lauren, in relative youth, what with her just thirty eight and me forty one. beaten and broken by this imperfect world, i suppose the cruelty of life finally caught up with me.
now, me and our three children stumble through a new world, toward an uncertain, but certainly diminished, future. everything you do has consequences, indeed. once we loved madly, deeply, and our love for each other, and for life itself, made us think it a good idea to create new life.
now, here they lie tonight, fast asleep: three motherless children, two of them so young they will never have even the slightest memory of their mother. we got them into this mess, and tonight i think, i will admit it, i think, perhaps it would have been better for them if i hadn't bothered to go out and meet their mother that night sixteen years ago.
but i can't take it back, can i?
we're here, in part because of a snap decision i made a long, long time ago. go to the bar or go home, think i'll go to the bar, and i did, and sixteen years later there's three kids with no mother and a husband mad with grief.
i suppose there will be other snap decisions to be made along the way: let us hope that some of them work out for us.
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