"Now the street's turning blue
the dogs are barking
and the night has come
and there's tears that are falling from your blue eyes now
I wonder where you are
and I whisper your name
The only way to find you
is if I close my eyes
I'll find you with my blind love
the only kind of love is stone blind love..."
Tom Waits, "Blind Love"
'Twas the day after Christmas, the day after the worst Christmas of my life, the first without my beloved wife; the day after Christmas, or Boxing Day as they call it in Lauren's homeland, and I woke with the idea that I had to DO something, anything; I had to get out of the house.
So I packed up the two little ones, loaded the double stroller into the family vehicle, and took a short ride up to Saratoga Springs.
Perhaps a walk would do me some good.
I parked up near the top of the hill in Congress Park, up past the Canfield Casino. Dug out the stroller and unfolded it. Unpacked Riley from his car seat, struggled to zip his jacket, struggled to get his mittens on, struggled to get him buckled into his seat in the stroller. Repeated the process with Evie. This stuff always flustered me; as a large man I always found it a bit tricky handling the little ones, but then, up until a couple of months ago I always had Lauren to help me out; between her ability to quickly maneuver a fifteen month old and a three year old and her ability to gently tease me about my inability to manage with the mittens and such, my clumsiness served as a source of amusement. Now, alone, it served only as a source of frustration.
Wheeled the stroller up Union Avenue a few blocks, past the old Victorian mansions, most of which have long since been divvied up into apartments or offices or condos or bed-and-breakfasts.
As we moved across the East Side Riley fell asleep but Evie remained wide awake, laughing hysterically every time my face contorted in response to approaching an icy patch of sidewalk. "Uh oh we gonna hit some bumpy ice now!" she'd yell, and then the sun came out, for what seemed like the first time in weeks. As we walked along I thought that we were walking together through the least painful half hour I've seen in the thirty six days since Lauren died.
&&&&
The streets were quiet, and my mind began to wander, it began to wander backwards in time, as it does so often these days, and I thought back to another Boxing Day, of fourteen years ago.
December 26th, 1993: I got on an American Airlines flight out of JFK bound for Manchester, England, bound for the glory of the welcoming arms of my bride-to-someday-be, Lauren.
The decision to fly over for a two week visit came suddenly, and it was met with skepticism in some corners, for it wasn't what you would call "responsible." Me and Lauren had already set our wedding date, July 23rd, 1994, and we planned for her to come to the US to live with me.
Only problem with that plan was that I didn't have much money and I didn't have what we used to call a "real" job. I did temp work, scoring about $8.00 an hour, while living with my parents, putatively to save money married life.
I'd traveled over to the UK to see Lauren that September, for three luscious weeks; got to meet her folks and her good friends, got to travel through the Lake District and down to London, and of course mostly just got to be with the love of my life after four long months apart.
When I returned home I trudged into the temp agency looking for a new gig and it turned out they had one, working second shift over at a factory in the Rensselaer Technology Park that mixed chemicals together to form other chemicals.
What I didn't know when I turned up to work on the first day was that the gents working permanently in the factory had already chewed up and spit out two "college boys" in just under two weeks, and they fully intended on making me victim number three.
What they didn't know was that this particular college boy had gotten himself so in love with a woman thousands of miles away that he could put up with anything. I could have cared less. Just days after coming home from three weeks with Lauren I felt so lovesick, so full of sadness and angst and yearning over living so far apart from her, there was nothing they could do or say to me that would get more than a passing glance from my attention span.
Oh, they tried. My first night they sat me down at some hydraulic press, the metal part of it about the size of a sewer lid, and they gave me a little wire brush the size of a toothbrush and told me to scrub every last bit of the caramel-colored, sticky gunk off the thing. They told me it would probably take me a couple of days, and to ask any questions if I needed to.
So I sat there and scrubbed that damn thing and didn't say a word. I sat there and daydreamed about Lauren, about my recent time with her, about giving her a ring of engagement in a secluded, shaded spot on the banks of a lake called Tarn Hows, about the night in London when I met all her best friends from school and they got me stinking drunk on pints of Bass and Guinness, about falling asleep in her arms every night, and on and on, sweet memory upon sweet memory.
I cleaned the press and then they made me clean out some gooey pink chemical soup from a three hundred gallon mixer with nothing other than paper towels; another two or three day job, and again, they didn't hear a word out of me. I put my mind into daydream overdrive and did the work they wanted done.
After a month or so the gents realized that they just couldn't seem to break me, and they started to warm up to me, and pretty soon that had me doing real work, and then they started giving me overtime, and next thing you knew, as we got into early December, rumors started flying that they wanted to hire me full time (the rumors were confirmed when I gave my boss notice two weeks before Christmas).
Like I said, I could have used the job, what with our wedding day just eight months or so away, and even though I never really imagined myself doing factory work, I had come to like the work and to like the guys on my shift, and they started you out in the high $20's with plenty of overtime if you wanted it and good benefits to boot, and as one guy said, hey, you're a college boy, you do good out on the floor for a year or two you'll wind up in management making the big money. On top of which, the employment options for inexperienced English majors in upstate New York in 1993 were few, far between, and nowhere near as well paid.
I mentioned my prospective employment at the factory to my parents, and they seemed pleased; I finally seemed to have moved into the realm of the adult, the responsible.
But then out of nowhere I came home on a Saturday afternoon from a trip to the local mall with airplane tickets in my hand. I'd booked a flight to see my honey, two weeks of bliss starting the day after Christmas. The thing was, I just couldn't bear not seeing her, and I'd saved up enough money to make the trip, so I decided to make it and let the future take care of itself.
The folks were not pleased. What are you thinking about, I remember my mother asking me; I know you miss Lauren but when you get married you're not going to be able to live on love, you can't pay the rent with love, love doesn't put food on a table.
&&&&
After walking a few more blocks Evie fell asleep too. The sun stayed shining, the day turned warmer than I had expected it to and I began to sweat; I'd overdressed.
Still, I continued on walking, and looking backwards again at that Boxing Day journey. I remembered getting to JFK way too early and sitting in a bar at the terminal way too long drinking and talking with strangers and going outside to have a cigarette or three and then somehow almost missing the flight; I remembered arriving in Manchester near dawn and I remembered, with a lump in my throat, walking through a set of doors and seeing Lauren, I remembered the absolute joy of feeling her in my arms for the first time in months, and I walked along with two of our children sleeping in a stroller and I just wanted to yell, at the top of my lungs, why oh why has that joy been taken from us so soon?
&&&&
I didn't yell out; why wake the kids?
I did think, well, just one more holiday to suffer through, New Year's Eve.
I've always had mixed feeling about New Year's Eve, it does have a degree of the over hyped to it but then when you are with someone you are madly in love with it can be fun, no matter what you do, and then once again as I walked I drifted back, to the same trip over to see Lauren, to New Year's Eve 1993.
In addition to her "real" job working in the admin department of a candle company she worked occasionally as a bartender at her town's Labour Club, and she had to work that particular night, but only early, from four until seven, I believe. After that we had some very big party to go to.
I went down to the club with her for her shift; not many customers in, but a few of them bought the both of us some celebratory drinks, and after an hour or so we both began to feel a buzz. Lauren sent me out to pick up a couple of bottles of wine to bring to the party.
On the way back to the Labour Club I sat down on a bench at the intersection of Dalton Road and Cavendish Street, sort of the center of the town's pedestrian shopping district. I sat down on a bench to have a smoke. Sunset. A cool but not cold twilight, not a cloud in the sky. I looked around at this very English-looking little town and thought, well, my boy, what a crazy-beautiful turn your life has taken: a year and a half ago you'd never even met this woman, six months ago you'd never been on an airplane, and here you live tonight in this foreign land, sitting on a bench staring up at the fading light and hearing the faint strains of the birds coming in off the Irish Sea, on New Year's Eve, and I realized that the wildest of my dreams come true.
I made my way back to the club and her shift ended and we went back to her folks' place. They had gone out for the night, and we had intended to, but we never made it past the brief beginnings of getting changed for that party. We wound up in front of the fireplace drinking those bottles of wine meant for the party, watching '93 pass into '94 alone, a little drunk on wine and drunk out of our minds on our love.
&&&&
I pushed the stroller around the streets for a good hour and a half, worked up a good sweat. Evie and Riley both woke up, but they sat quietly as we passed over the sidewalks. I made it back to the car, went through the awkward, lonely dance of getting them out of the stroller, out of their coats and hats and mittens and back into their car seats.
I sat down in the driver's seat and looked at the both of them in the rear view mirror. The looked like normal, happy little babies, not motherless children. I sighed and thought, well, we'll not have much celebrating to do this particular New Year's Eve, will we?
There won't be much to do but maybe read some of our old love letters before turning in early; not much to hope for other than that none of the kids wakes up crying in the middle of the night, and that the next year does not goes as badly as this one has. Not much to do but to turn out the lights early and toss and turn in the dark, alone in our bed as I ponder the question:
Was it worth it?
Was the ecstasy of New Year's Eve 1993 worth the agony of New Year's Eve 2007?
I must admit that sometimes, during those moments when I can't imagine how a human heart could possibly shatter into any more pieces than mine has, I answer that question with a resounding, no!
But then I think about how once upon a time, in a far-away place, I rang in the dawn of a new year in the arms of a beautiful woman, both of us young and wild and on fire with a stone blind love that we just knew would last forever.