this is what love is for
to be out of place
gorgeous and alone
face to face
with no larger problems
that need to be erased
nothing more important
than to know
someone's listening
Wilco, "Impossible Germany"
Sometime in the early evening, a message came in from my sister.
"I just checked the lilacs...
they look they are going to bloom..."
The lilac tree...
Five years ago this spring, and it seems like fifty years now, I stood in my living room and looked out into my backyard and caught sight of my wife and her father digging a hole in the ground, with a young lilac tree on the ground nearby.
For some reason a neighbor had passed it on to us, I think they had decided to put up a fence and the little tree had stood in their way, and they dug it out and after some sort of discussion, it wound up in our yard.
Lauren and her father, digging a hole in the ground, laughing and talking on a warm spring Sunday afternoon.
&&&&
He was seventy years old at the time. Strong and vital, one of those guys who always seemed way younger than his years, and for most of our marriage, we had assumed he'd live a long time. I thought he could have passed for mid-fifties.
But he seemed out of sorts on that visit over here. Tired and pale and cranky. He adored our children but lost patience with our oldest son a couple of times, totally out of character for him.
Lauren was from England, an only child. We got married in 1994 and settled here in upstate New York, my home territory. She liked it here.
After we had our first child in December of 1998, her parents started coming to visit us frequently.
We figured that this would go on for another decade at least, maybe two.
But on that visit in 2005, he seemed out of sorts. A recent diagnosis of diabetes. He'd lost a lot of weight. He looked, for the first time since I'd met him, frail, thin, sickly, tired. At night, after we put the two children to bed we would eat dinner. After we ate he would sit on the couch, leaned forward, his eyes closed, rocking back and forth, looking pained. One afternoon I asked him to help me move some wood to the garage, nothing heavy, nothing the usual him couldn't handle with ease. Unlike himself, he took as little as possible and grimaced and breathed heavily as he did.
One night after they went to bed for the evening a quizzical smile spread across Lauren's face, and she looked off into the distance, away from me.
"I never thought I'd see the day, but my dad looks old," she said with a sigh.
"My dad is sick."
&&&&
He was sick.
Her parents went home in early June, and two or three weeks later they called with bad news: he had pancreatic cancer.
Lauren went home a few weeks later with our two children to see him, to spend some time with him while he was still relatively well.
A few months later, in March of 2006, we all went to see him one last time.
She told him she was pregnant with our third child, with the one who turned out most like his mother, with an irrepressible smile.
He smiled and hugged her and then said, "I won't get to see this one."
&&&&
He died two weeks after we got there.
We sold the house with the lilac tree in the backyard; we thought we needed more room, what with the third child on the way and the anticipation of Lauren's mom coming to stay with us for very extended periods in light of it all.
A few days before we moved, I spotted Lauren out in the yard by herself with a shovel, digging up the lilac tree.
"Is that thing going to survive all this moving around?" I asked her.
"I want to take it with us," she replied.
I knew why.
&&&&
We sold the house faster than we thought we would and wound up not finding another to buy. We wound up moving, temporarily we said, into a flat my brother and his wife own, in my hometown, an out-of-the-way and decaying mill town with no mill anymore.
Lauren decided she wanted to transplant the lilac tree to my sister's yard. There was an odd urgency to her decision. She insisted on it moving there, and nowhere else. We delivered it one Sunday afternoon, and my brother-in-law for some reason put it in the ground right next to their front door.
Lauren seemed pleased about this. She loved my sister's house, loved the holidays and the run-of-the-mill get-togethers we held there; my sister's house seemed to turn into the nerve center of the family. It was where we always seemed to wind up gathered together.
&&&&
The third child arrived a few months later, and a few too many weeks early, in August of 2006. After a tough delivery and some time in the neo-natal intensive care unit, he thrived. We named him Riley, a Gaelic name meaning valiant or brave. Considering his tenuous entrance into this world, and the way he made it through, we thought it fit.
We hunkered down in the flat, looked around for places to buy, but a year and change went by and we still hadn't found anything.
And then, in the late summer of 2007, a doctor found a tumor in Lauren's brain. Benign he said, but mammoth, and in a bad place.
A few weeks later, she had surgery to remove the tumor, but as will happen, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, and she died from surgical complications that November.
&&&&
The lilac tree continued to grow outside my sister's front door. In the springtimes of 2007, 2008, and 2009, it grew buds, but it refused to flower for some reason. I began to think it would never flower, and I began to think there was some sort of poetic justice in that.
But now she says it looks like it will bloom, at any moment.
&&&&
Today my parents and I set up the big boy bed for that third child of ours, for Riley.
He loves the bed.
At nap time this afternoon, I looked into his room and watched him sleep in his new bed. Peaceful and beautiful, and I couldn't help but lament the fact that his mother could not see him there.
&&&&
Last night I went to see a movie with a recent acquaintance, a movie called "Crazy Heart." A washed-out country singer on his last legs, choking on his own legend and failures and booze and cigarettes somehow finds it in himself to make a last stand.
Later in the evening, after a dinner and a drive, I dropped the acquaintance off. I put the car in park and we sat there and then, after a moment or two, she turned to me and laughed and said, "this is bizarre."
I'm not sure what to do with that, but then, what is not bizarre, I think. How strange it was to be there, how strange it is to be anywhere.
In the movie, the hero writes a song that revives his career, a song that says, in part, "and this ain't no place for the weary kind."
No, it isn't.
I barely slept last night, and then I spent the day chasing my three children around, and I guess I'll barely sleep tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps, the weariness will set in, but right now, I ain't weary, I'm awake, wide awake and alive in the middle of a bright night, waiting eagerly for a call from my sister telling me that finally, the lilac tree bloomed.