"My father said, 'Son, we're lucky in this town,
It's a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps its arms around you,
Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone
You know that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'."
"Long Walk Home" Bruce Springsteen
I wrote part one way of this past four years ago now, one Friday night only weeks after Lauren died, and I couldn't even have imagined what part two would wind up looking like. It was a Friday night, and I'd just dropped off my eldest son at my sister's house for the evening, he used to love going there on weekend nights, well, he still does, and I'm still not sure if it's because it makes him forget or because it helps him remember.
I mean, I still remember when I go there, and I wonder if it's the same for him: sometimes, in my sister's kitchen, if the right soup boils in the right pot on the right burner, I can feel myself slipping back there, back into November, 2007, with Lauren hanging onto her life by a thread, a thread that we had to be kidding ourselves to think it would hold. The night she died my sister had a pot of vegetable soup on the stove when the call came, get here, get here quick, another problem, and she left the soup on the stove and she left the stove on and she got there quick, and she sat between myself and Lauren's mother as a tear slipped down the cheek of one doctor as he listened to the other doctor say, if this was my wife, if this was my daughter, if this was my sister, I'd let her go, and so I did.
&&&&
So it was two, maybe three weeks afterwards, and I had just dropped off my eldest at my sister's house and I stopped into a wine store and picked up a few bottles for myself. The cashier busied himself with hitting on an attractive middle-aged woman poring over the reds. They talked about the so-called disasters that had befallen them over the past few days.
I hastily picked out three or four bottles, I wasn't feeling fussy. My wife was dead and I felt like drinking myself into oblivion, though, truth be told, two or three weeks after your wife dies, oblivion is nowhere to be found, no matter how much red you suck down: at that stage of the game, death haunts you even in your sleep, there is absolutely no fucking relief from it that soon in, there is nothing you can breathe, hear, smell, touch, taste, or think, that won't remind you of the departed that soon into it.
The cashier exchanged complaints with the attractive middle-aged woman and I hated the both of them as I tiredly dropped my four bottles of red down onto the counter.
"Yeah," I said, "tell me about it. You think you had a shitty week, you don't know the half of it."
The cashier laughed nervously, and his flirting partner drifted behind me.
"Will that be it?"
I almost laid it on them right then and there, but something held me back, and I kept my big mouth shut.
"Yeah, that's it."
I gave him my debit card. He swiped it, bagged my bottles, and gave me my receipt. As I exited I could hear him resume his reverie. You fool, I thought. You don't know what trouble is.
&&&&
I cane home and opened up one bottle, then another, then another. Deep into that third bottle my daughter woke up crying, and I went to her and picked her up out of her crib and held tightly onto her, I thought of my brother, sleeping peacefully in the upstairs apartment, I thought of how he had said to me, a day or two before, as bad as this is for us, ya know, I get to lay down next to my wife every night and talk about it, it's bad, but it ain't anywhere near as bad for me as it is for you, and my daughter just kept on crying, and I ruminated on how Lauren, an only child, had talked me into having three children after watching me and my brother and my sisters interact, you don't know how lucky you are, she used to say, but that night, deep into a third bottle with a daughter crying for her dead mother on my shoulder, I felt anything but lucky.
&&&&
A long walk home meant something different back then. To me, it meant a long, hard slog through years and years spent alone after which, if all my mystical-pseudo-religious best case scenarios came true, I might have a few seconds where I felt at one with Lauren one last time before I drifted off into eternal rest. I knew, of course, I would walk through those years alone; I knew I'd never want anyone the way I wanted her, I knew the damage ran too deep, I knew there was no getting over it, and besides, who the hell would want a damaged middle-aged dude with three young ones.
&&&&
Maybe a month into it, less actually, now that I remember it, and my sister and I sat in a coffee shop. I remember sitting in a leather chair and breaking down. I can't do this, I told her. I can't do this. I don't know what that means in real terms, but I can't do this. I can't raise these kids. I can't do it. You all gotta figure something out, if it means taking the kids away from me for good, so be it, but I can't do it.
She listened to me. My sister listened to me. She listened to far too much, far more than any sister should have to listen to. She walked up to the register and saw some CDs for sale. She picked one up, something called "Magic" by Springsteen. She paid for it and then handed it to me.
Listen to this, she said. Maybe something in there will help you out. Do what you can with the kids, and we'll talk about it again in a week or two. Maybe you'll feel up to it it then. She looked sad. She loved Lauren, too, I remember thinking; once in a while, not very often, but once in a while, I used to realize, oh yeah, people other than myself and my kids miss her.
I put the cd into the player in my car and ripped through it, a few seconds of each song at a time.
Only one of 'em hit me at the time, but it hit me like a ton of bricks: "Long Walk Home."
&&&&
I had to work this morning, which is unusual; I'm on duty maybe two or three Saturdays a year.
I slipped into a Stewart's on my way in to grab a cup of coffee; I'd awoken too late to brew a pot at home, as I always do on a work morning. I made my cup and then got in line and someone tapped me on the shoulder. A guy I knew from way, way back in the day. He had a cup of his own and one of the New York tabloids under his arm, a Giants fan from birth, he needs to read the latest, I think, me, unfortunately the gods made me and my brother Jets fans, and we'll never know what it's like to have our boys prepping for the Supe.
"How you doin'?" he asked with a big smile.
And ya know, I probably don't have much in common with him as far as politics goes, shit, if he knew I was even mentioning his presence on a liberal blog he'd probably throw a shit-fit, but I'll tell you this: in the days after Lauren died, when a lot of other people who should have known better would avert their eyes and turn in the other direction and pretend they didn't see me, one day in the supermarket he saw me, and he went out of his way to break off a conversation he was in the middle of and he strode up to me and said, hey man, I heard about your wife, I'm so sorry, and you don't know how much that meant to, and I don't think he does either, and he probably doesn't want to, so I just shook his hand and said, I'm doin' good man, real good. How the kids doin' he asked. Real good man, and he smiled.
&&&&
I drove on out of town, sipping my coffee. I headed west out 67, and to my left I saw the rail-yard, against the odds springing to life again. Trucks and boxcars spread out against the sunrise, two, three, four miles out into the distance. Twenty years ago or so we thought the yards were done for good, and maybe four years ago I thought my own best days were gone for good, but on my way to work, seeing the yards alive again, I couldn't help but think of how I seemed as hopeless as the yards that sat silent for the better part of two decades.
&&&&
Tonight, the people who matter most came through, in their own ways. My sister took my oldest in for the night, he still loves going there, and she puts up with his nonsense because she knows it helps him. I made pizza, the way my mother and my Nana, gone a few weeks now, used to, and the little ones devoured the cheese pies, leaving the hot salsicce and fresh ricotta to the grownups. My dad mocked me for not knowing what SPSS is, what kind of data guy are you anyway, he laughed, and I said, shit, we're way beyond SPSS old man, and he and my brother talked about databases and writing queries, and my mother listened on you tube to some songs a relative had banged out and the kids ran around like Banshees.
&&&&
My brother and his wife left, as did my folks. And as they did, I thought about how I never would have made that long walk home without them. I thought about how I always, always, always made fun of my hometown, I thought of how I moved out more than twenty years ago and supposedly never looked back, and how I moved back for what was supposed to be three months, and the three months turned into six years. I thought about my mother once telling me how she had met my father at a railroad crossing, sometime in the early sixties.
At some point tonight, with my parents and my brother and his wife surrounding me in the kitchen, I thought back to some dark nights more than four and a half years ago. I thought back to how they, all of them, surrounded me in those days and nights. Before they killed Lauren off for good, we'd gather around the kitchen island every night and raise our glasses of red wine to her eventual recovery.
The recovery never came, and then we would raise up those same glasses to her memory.
Tonight, she didn't even get mentioned, and I didn't even notice until now, deep in the middle of the night.
Tonight, I thought of other things. Until I thought of A Long Walk Home, the first time around; until I thought of how things used to be. Until I thought of how grateful I am that things ain't what they used to be: I never, ever thought I would, but yeah, eventually, I made that long walk home.