"this old man i've talked about
broke his own heart
poured it in the ground
big red tree grew up and out
throws up its leaves
spins 'round and 'round
i know all this and more
so take your hat off
when you're talking to me
and be there when i feed the tree..."
Belly, "Feed The Tree" from the album Star
Well of course I can't sleep, on this, another lonely Friday night...I sit here with some fine beers and some tunes we listened to back in 1993, such as the one above...and I try to write the sorrow out, like it's something I could wring out of a wet shirt...as if I could type it away...Lord knows I have tried...I try to type something that might do justice to my Lauren, to today, to how I sat on the banks of the Geyser Creek watching two of our children playing with three of my sister’s children, watching them all happy and momentarily oblivious to the crushing reality the grownups around them cannot run from...
trying to type something that ties today together with a long-ago April day, when, filled beyond measure with new, young love, I took my future bride to the same spot...today people packed the park, parents and children and a few young lovers here and there (did you see the guy in the Mets muscle tee and his girlfriend in the black pants, for instance?) enjoying the illusion of summer-like warmth...but the angle of the sun told a different story, the skin may have felt summer but the eyes took in the light and saw mid-April, the eyes saw the possibility of gray and cold and maybe even snow a few days off...I thought of how different everything looked back on that long-ago April day...it had snowed some the night before and though the earth had warmed some in those afternoon hours, we felt a chill in the air, we wore jackets to ward off that chill, though mostly we wore each other’s arms and hands...and some of that previous night’s snow lay scattered in shaded patches of ground...and we had the park to ourselves, no one around us at all, alone together, with the ground muddy and soft beneath us we walked along that creek, alive and alight in the knowledge that in twenty four hours we would part, alive and trying to absorb each second of togetherness, alive to the point of bursting, with the knowledge that we would have to tear each other from ourselves and say goodbye for many long months...the sorrow of the impending goodbye hung in the chilled air, unmistakable and unavoidable, but we knew then that we would someday meet again, that we would someday join together for life...and we talked about the future and held on tight to each other and we burned those moments into our souls and left them there, knowing, without having to say it, that we would someday need the memories of those moments, without knowing how soon that someday would come...and that night I would cook for her and we would drink too much wine and we’d fall asleep, hoping against hope that someone or something would come in the night and give us a way out of the months apart...during the very first days of our love, while on the phone late one night, I told her that I thought we should face the fact that we just had to live in the same place some day, rather than thousands of miles apart...she didn’t seem to believe me but I told her that I knew that I would love her for a long time to come...and she asked me, what do you mean by a long time, and I answered that I would love her until she was ninety-four...and forever after that conversation, in good times and in bad, she’d say, you promised to love me for seventy years...today two of our children walked that same ground, in the false warmth of mid-April, and they smiled and laughed and lived the particular joys of their particular childhoods...perhaps they will remember their own days upon these banks, perhaps some day in memory of them they will grow up and take their own young loves and walk along these same banks, and perhaps they will stop for a second and think of their mother and father, and a circle will close, for the good...we all walked over to a waterfall, my brother-in-law and the four older children walking ahead, and me and my sister and my little three year old girl lagging behind...my girl stopped, stooped down to pick up some leaves, and then she threw them into the air and laughed as the leaves fluttered through the air around us...and as she stood there the sun shined down through the trees onto her hair, and the light of the sun suddenly brought out red tints in her hair, the red of her mother’s hair, and I turned to my sister and said, look! Her hair! Look at the red in there!...and my sister smiled, for she saw it there, too...we saw my girl’s mother there, in there, in that red...we didn’t get seventy years, and to tell the truth, as life wore on and wore us down, I didn’t think I’d make it that far, but I thought we’d get a lot closer than we did, for of course we did not get even close, fifteen years is what we got, start to finish...the afternoon got late and we had to go...and my oldest son went with my sister and his cousins back to their house, and I got my daughter into our car, and I watched my sister’s car pull away, and I looked out the front window, out at the ground I once walked with my love, with our daughter behind me, I looked out at that ground and suddenly the tears overwhelmed me...seventy years, way too much to ask, but was it too much to ask that we could raise these children together for a bit longer, was it too much to ask that my love not die at the age of thirty eight?...apparently it was too much to ask...I start the car but cannot drive, I feel the sobs wrack my chest, and I try to compose myself...I think of my love and I walking that ground, of how we never could have known what lay ahead...and I think that Lauren was the best thing that ever happened to me, I think of how the reality of our love far exceeded my youthful true-love dreams...she gave me the best years of my life, and though I will pay for those years the rest of my days, at a cost far higher than I ever could have imagined, I would still choose to pay that price, even knowing what I know now...I dry my eyes and put the car in reverse and look back in the rear-view mirror at our girl, the one who looks and acts so much like her mother...seventy years, ha, not even close, and our daughter will not even be able to summon the memory of her own mother as she walks through her grown-up years, but then, perhaps we had our seventy years, and many more, for in our daughter and in our grandchildren and in all the generations to follow, even though they will at best have a very, very vague sense of it, a vague sense that a string of young hopeful lovers came before them, still, they don’t have to know it, our love will carry on within them, to hell with a mere seventy years, I drive away, into the face of the setting sun, still weeping, and thinking, sorry for selling us short, Lauren, seventy years is nothing, for I’ll love you forever...