"slippin' and slidin' around in your head
it's be-bop-a-lu-la and baby you're dead
so come on
make a bright new day
i need a prayer here
need your blessing
cast an eye back as you run
turn around boy
see the rainbow come..."
The next-to-last Saturday of April 2009 broke sunny and way warmer than normal here in upstate New York, sunny and as sweltering as any Saturday in August. Around ten I managed to get Evie and Riley into the car and we headed off to the Troy farmer's market.
Despite the warmth, the market was still inside the Atrium; per the schedule, they'd not move outside until May.
A summer-like day, but they still called it the winter market.
Like a creature of habit, I park inside the dark, dingy, urine-soaked parking garage next to the Atrium whenever we go to the "winter" market. Never fails, that's where I park. I don't even think about it, a pure auto-pilot decision.
On this Saturday, though, something carried me past the garage entrance. I drove on up to the light and took a right onto River Street, and then drove on a few blocks. A bit past city hall and the monument that stands in the middle of a patch of grass, I found a spot for the car and I pulled in. I felt like walking a bit. A nice day, if a bit too warm, and a two year old and a four year old in tow, and plenty on my mind: I needed to clear my head. I thought a little walk would do us all a bit of good.
&&&&
A few weeks ago, sometime this just-past April, I reached into a big plastic storage bin underneath my bed and pulled out a handful of letters, ancient messages in a box, letters me and Lauren wrote each other many years ago, as young lovers, separated temporarily by the Atlantic Ocean.
The first one I read was one from her, written in early March of 1995. We'd been married for a little over seven months by that point, and in those seven months, we'd spent a grand total of eight days together in the same place. She waited back home in the UK while I worked my new job here, we waited patiently for the INS to give her a green card.
I read the letter.
And somewhere in there, she wrote that she knew she'd arrive here soon, because, as she said, "April is our month."
&&&&
Yes, April was our month.
We started our relationship in December of '92, maybe thirty-six hours before she had to return to her homeland. She went home and I stayed here and we wondered about what might happen to us, but then, in April of '93, she came over here to see me for two weeks, and that visit sealed our fates. She came back in April of '94, after I'd gone over there in September and December of '93, and we got married in July of '94.
But April was our month, and in that letter I read a few weeks ago, she expressed the certainty that April of '95 would see us reunited for good. Forever.
Or what we thought was forever.
&&&&
I missed "Goodbye Jumbo" when it came out in 1990; I might have caught "Way Down Now" or "Put The Message In The Box" on one of the local collge stations, but I never heard the album as a whole until April of 1993.
Living with my boy Dan in a big old two bedroom apartment on Chestnut Street. We didn't have a television, by design; we wanted the tunes to dominate whatever playtime we could manage to scrounge up. We listened to a lot of stuff, most prominently the new releases out that winter by Dinosaur Jr., "Where You Been," and the Jayhawks, "Hollywood Town Hall."
Sometime early in that April of '93, just to change things up and give our ears a break from the stuff we'd practically overdosed on in the early months of that year, Dan popped his copy of "Goodbye Jumbo" into the player.
I fell in love with it instantly.
A Beatle-esque, elegiac meditation on the state of the world and the state of love, it hit me right between the eyes. Sometimes melancholic and even despondent, sometimes joyous and optimistic, it captured perfectly my sense of a world that had seemed to have gone both so wrong in a larger sense, what with injustice seemingly pervading almost every streetcorner, and yet, in what I had found with Lauren, so damn right.
&&&&
When this April came, April of 2009, I found myself thinking back almost obsessively to that record, and to Lauren's visit here in April of 1993. I sometimes thought of the other Aprils, '94 and '95, but it was '93 that seemed to occupy my mind more than anything else. I am blessed, and cursed, with an elephantine memory of life-events, and so I can remember way too much of those two weeks, and as each day passed, from the anniversary of her arrival here on April 14th straight through to the anniversary of her departure on April 28th, I walked again through those days, all fourteen of them.
&&&&
We listened to a lot of music during her stay, but more than anything else, we listened to "Goodbye Jumbo."
And at some point, about ten days in, as we laid in my bed listening to the record yet again, singing along to every last note, "Sweet Soul Dream" came on, and I looked her in the eyes, and I can still remember exactly the way my room looked at that moment, with a sliver or two of mid-afternoon sunlight slipping through the spaces of the ill-fitting window shutters, and I can still remember exactly the way her face looked at that moment, close to mine, her eyes shining, a slight smile on her face as she bravely bore the horrible sound of me singing along to the song, and somewhere in the midst of those notes, I said to her, "this would kinda make a good wedding song, wouldn't it?"
And fifteen months later, on a sunny July day in the north of England, at the edge of a beautiful lake, surrounded by friends and family, that song played out as we danced our wedding dance.
&&&&
A little more than thirteen years later, thirteen happy years, the best years of our lives, she laid in a hospital bed. Her doctors wanted to wake her from a coma, just for a little while, after a surgery had gone horribly wrong. I consented to their wishes, in honor of the "full speed ahead" manner in which she lived her life.
An hour or two later, they came into a waiting room, looking concerned. They couldn't wake her. They didn't know why.
I asked if I could go in there. I told them that I thought that maybe a familiar voice might help matters. They didn't have much else to go on at that point, thought they clearly thought I had lost my mind. I didn't care. If waking her up, even for a few minutes, mattered that much, well, I figured I was just the guy to do it.
I walked into the room and talked to her for a bit.
She didn't respond.
Suddenly it came to me. Oh yeah. Why didn't I think of this sooner?
I started singing to her. I sang out the first verse of "Sweet Soul Dream," then the chorus, then the next verse.
As it turned out, other things went wrong, and, twenty two days later, she died.
But there are a few people in this world who were in that room with me that day, and they will tell you:
when I sang out the second verse of that song, she opened her eyes. She woke up, for a few minutes.
&&&&
So as April of '09 passed me by, I relived days from another April, the one we had in '93.
I did the same thing last year, not even a half a year into my time without her, but this time around, while it still hurt, it did not hurt as badly, I managed some smiles amongst the tears this time around, and I even managed, during one of those nights, to listen, for the first time since her death, to "Goodbye Jumbo."
&&&&
I have visited with what they call a "grief counselor" since five days after she died. Once a week for the first nine or ten months, and twice a week thereafter.
Sometimes, in that room, I have cursed the power of my memory.
But he had a different take on it.
As he listened to my stories, as he listened to me describe how close some of those moments seemed, as he listened to me describe the sensation that those moments sat somewhere very close by, close enought to touch almost, almost, almost, but just not quite, he would say to me, "perhaps you have glimpsed eternity."
And though I would nod in agreement when he said this, I really had no idea of what he meant. Eternity? What the hell is eternity? All I know, I thought, is the now, and the not-now, and not-now is what was and will never be, and the now is the rottenness of today, of total and abject suffering. I knew I didn't think eternity involved me and Lauren playing a perpetual and inifitely satisfying game of pinochle as the heavenly hosts sat by twiddling their thumbs, and I thought often of a Joseph Campbell quote a friend of mine liked to recite, that went something like, "eternity is not the here-after, this is it.If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere."
This is it.
&&&&
So I walked the kids round the farmer's market. The usual vendors hawking their wares: homemade honey and ethical laundry detergent and carefully slaughtered edible dead animal and lovingly made baked goods and so on. I really wanted some good potatoes and carrots for baking or grilling the next day, but the root vegetables had long since vacated the premises. It was April, after all.
Evie and Riley ate way-too-huge chocolate chip cookies, and we wandered around. Well, I wandered, and they ran and screeched and bumped into people. I talked to the butcher for a bit and he gave me his number and we made a deal on a piece of pig I'm a-gonna cook up into pulled pork when I have a party in honor of my forty-third birthday later this month.
I ran into an old friend and she invited us back to her house for lunch. I wandered around some more. The kids ran around the elevator, and we rode it up and down a few times, and then we got off, and they ran around it some more, and I approached a stand selling some arugula. Bought a bag. The woman selling looked at me, and then nodded at Evie and Riley and asked me, "are they yours?"
They were sort of on the borderline between cute and obnoxiously out of control at that moment, and I was tempted to go all Peter in that moment and deny them, who, those kids? Never met 'em. But I fessed up and claimed them for my own.
"Well," she said, "I...those kids are just EXUDING JOY!!!"
&&&&
We left not long after, and walked through the heat down River Street. I had told them we were going to "Amy's house" for lunch. Evie had barely said hello to Amy in the market, but she seemed VERY excited about the prospect of going to her house for lunch.
We walked down River Street. Somewhere along the way, we passed a used furniture store. A young woman wearing a black dress and hip dark shades sat in a chair. Now, there's nothing that makes me more uncomfortable than my kids getting all up in the Kool-Aid of a young hottie, it looks like I'm training them or something, right? Well, obviously I am not, and it probably doesn't even look that way, but I am super-paranoid...
So, this woman, who I totally want to just walk right on by so I don't look like the fat old perv, sits there, and my kids, who, without even knowing it, seem to exist to make me squirm, lie down on the couch right next to her, and, of course, start talking to her.
And thet converse for a bit, in part about Evie's super-cool red sunglasses, and I just stare off idly into space, and they eventually finish up talking and the woman on the chair kinda pats Evie on the head and says, "thank you kid, you made my day."
&&&&
We walked on for awhile and came to the grassy area over by the monument. Two elderly folks discussing the relative merits of an apartment complex. Evie walks up to the old man and yells out, with a huge smile on her face, "WE GOIN' TO AMY'S HOUSE FOR LUNCH!!!!"
He looks at her and then at Riley, and then at me, and he smiles.
"God Bless You, Man. You got some beautiful children there. Beautuful children there. Beautiful. God Bless You..."
&&&&
I thank him, and then we hustle across the street toward the car.
I cast an eye back and look at the monument sticking up out of the grass. I get the kids into their seats. We going to Amy's house for lunch, I think.
I look back at the grass and think back to a day, not so long ago, only three years ago...me and Bailey and Evie and Lauren and her mom...World Party about to go up on the stage set up there on River Street...and Lauren went over there, talked to a guy who looked like he was in the band, he looked like the violinist...and she told him our story, or sone of it at least, and she asked if they wouldn't mind playing "Sweet Soul Dream"...and he went over and talked to Wallinger...and maybe halfway through their set, they started playing a song, and we recognized the strains, it was our song, and the violinist looked over at us and he smiled and so did we, and they sang and we danced.
&&&&
So I got them into the car, and then I looked around at the monument. I saw Lauren talking to the violinist, and I saw us dancing there, and I saw us dancing at our wedding, and I saw two of our children about to fall asleep in their seats, and then I saw it, for the first time, I saw eternity:
I saw me and their mother embracing, wordlessly and full of joy, in an airport waiting area in April of 1993, I saw us lying in a bed singing "Sweet Soul Dream", I saw us dancing to that same song on our wedding day, and I saw too many other things to mention here, and I saw how all of those things led me to park there instead of in the usual place, I saw how all of those things signified a love story that began sixteen, or maybe sixteen hundred, years ago, and yes, I looked back in the rear view mirror at those faces and finally I saw it, I saw that even if their mother no longer walked among us, the moments of love and joy me and their mother shared along the way turned into something else, they took on another form, they became children who left strangers to comment on the joy they exuded, and for me, for now, that is enough.