"...packed and all eyes turned in
no one to see on the quay
no one waving for me
just the shoreline receding
ticket in my hand
I’m thinking
wish I didn’t hand it in..."
Okkervil River, "Lost Coastlines"
Can’t even find words anymore, a year minus five days since she died and I'm left rendered incoherent: the longing to speak, to say something to make some kind of sense of it still there, but then, there’s just no sense to be made of losing a wife and mother at so young an age, and so I can’t find any words, or any good ones at least, leaving me with nothing but babble and shapeless sound, vague echoes of once-heard melodies, nothing to dig my fingernails into, just a disjointed memory-flood.
A little December ’92 here, a swath of August ’05 there, then a Saturday afternoon ride out through some country roads in early ’99, our three month old boy asleep behind us, with the here and now and common sense and hope and calm overrun and overpowered and exposed, and outside the rain pours down and drum-rolls off the air conditioner I really need to take out of the dining room window, suppose I’ll get around to it eventually; it’ll get cold, eventually, like it always does around here, it’ll get cold and one day I’ll notice too much winter oozing through that window and I’ll give in, I laugh and think, yeah, giving in, there’s at least one thing I excel at, or at least, I used to.
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I remember as a kid my mother used to go and chaperone field trips; she’d go off for a few days while the class of one of her four children went off to New York or Boston or Washington for a few days. I remember as a kid, back when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old, my biggest fear in life was that my mom or dad would die.
And when my mom would go out on those trips, those fears would kick in to overdrive. My dad did his best, but even when we knew it was only a few days, my mom’s absence would cast a pall over the remains of the household. She’d leave meals for us in the fridge and we would come home and my dad would heat them up on the stove, and we’d eat in a sort of quiet that was alien to our normally boisterous dinner table.
She’d make my dad cook one night while she was gone, and he always cooked the same thing. My little brother called it "witches stew", because he hated it with a passion. My dad could not cook his way out of a paper bag, to twist an old cliché; he made exactly three dishes competently, tuna fish sandwiches, pancakes, and witches stew.
I actually loved witches stew, actually I still do though I have not made it in years, and anyway, the sight of my father making it provided my lone source of comfort during the seemingly long days of my mother’s absence. He’d dice up the onions, fry them up in a little margarine, then he’d cut the hot dogs up into dimes, throw them in, and then, after they cooked up a bit, he’d throw in a few cans of Campbell’s pork-n-beans, some ketchup, some mustard, and some chili powder, stir it up, put the cover on the pan, and then let it simmer for fifteen or twenty minutes. And then, voila: witches stew.
He always made it on Saturday, and that’s when my mom would return from those field trips, late in the day. You’d smell witches stew, see the sun going down in the sky, and you’d know mom would be home in a few hours.
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We didn’t have the proverbial pot to piss in at the time.
No money in the bank, no credit, no change under the couch cushions. Maybe forty dollars in a checking account. I was working part-time and Lauren wasn’t working at all. We had a two-family house, we lived in the upstairs flat. We had Bailey, three or four months old, and we had each other. We had nothing to do, a Saturday afternoon, and we went out for a ride in our semi-new car, we drove on out through the countryside, we watched the sun setting and Bailey slept behind us and we were young and in love and had decades stretched out in front of us, or so we thought.
On the way home we stopped at the supermarket near our place. Somewhere out on that ride I’d talked about my dad making witches stew in my childhood, and while we didn’t have much money, we had enough for me to make the stew, and a twelve pack of lousy beer to boot. We went home and I cut up the onions and the hot dogs, and then we put Bailey to bed and I finished the stew and we sat down on the couch, with steaming bowls and cold beers, we put on some tunes and sat there, we ate, and then we put our bowls down on the coffee table and she put her head on my shoulder and I put my arm around her and we sat and listened and talked and it seemed as if life could not get any better, though we both secretly hoped that it might.
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The other day I picked Bailey up from school, my mom was home with the two babies. I needed a few things. I got a basket, picked out some red peppers, some onions, some garlic, a few other things. Bailey asked for pumpkin muffin, like he used to back in the day, back when we were whole, and I said yeah, go ahead.
We walked around and I finished my shopping.
We got in line to pay.
While we waited, he looked at me and spoke up.
"Yup. Look around, dad. Moms over here, moms over there, moms everywhere, but I got no mom. It’s not fair."
What could I say?
No, it’s not fair. Life’s not fair, though our son is only nine years old, too young to make sense of that. I’m forty-two, and I’m too young to make sense of it. I feel paralyzed, I don’t know what to do or say. I put my arm around him, choke back the tears, and say, "yeah, Bailey, you’re right, it’s not fair."
We wait our turn in silence, and then we pay, and then we get in the car and go home.
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We had a good day today.
Bailey had a basketball game, early. It’s like herding cats, sometimes, trying to get a nine year old, a three year old, and a two year old , fed and dressed and out the door by nine-thirty in the morning, but I managed. We went to the game, and Bailey scored a few baskets, and his team won by some sort of shameful score along the lines of 36-5. Evie and Riley didn’t seem too interested in the game; in the lobby of the school hosting the game they had a big fish tank holding some small, colorful, exotic-looking fish. I tried to balance their interest in the fish with Bailey’s need to know that his dad cared about the game, and hopefully I managed it.
Afterwards, we went to the farmer’s market, and they all got cookies, Bailey hung out at the foot of a guy playing songs on a guitar, the last couple of weeks he claims he wants to learn how to play, and me and the babies walked around and picked up a piece of beef and some fingerlings and some nice looking carrots for tomorrow’s pot roast.
We left there and got stuff to make pizza tonight, and then we went to a bakery, and then a supermarket, and then we came home and the babies went in for naps and me and Bailey stood in the kitchen and shoved chips and salsa in our mouths, and we laughed when I missed my mouth by a mile with this one chip and spilled salsa all over the floor.
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Later on some big rain and some big wind came. My parents came over and my brother and his wife and their kids came downstairs. Sirens and air-horns blared, and we joked that maybe we should turn on the tee-vee and see if a tornado was headed our way.
The kids played and laughed and the kitchen smelled wonderful, I had some hot sopresseta and a hunk of imported provolone and I had sautéed some onions and salsicce to put on some of the pizzas, I had roasted peppers and ricotta to put on some of the others, and we laughed and talked and drank and I took those pizzas out and they came out perfect, sounded like broken glass when I cut them, crispy thin is the only way to go, sorry, and we ate and talked and drank, and at one point I opened the fridge to get some milk for the babies, and I thought back to another Saturday night, and I saw the stuff for tomorrow’s dinner in there, and then I looked at Bailey off in the living room, laughing with his cousins, and it smelled good, and it will tomorrow, but as I look at him I can’t help but think, sadly, that no matter how good it smells in here tonight, no matter how good it smells in here tomorrow, it will never smell like witches stew and someone waving on the quay, it will never smell like a Saturday’s sunset and his mother coming home.