"...And I miss her sometimes
Shaking like a leaf on the corner of Vine
But I heard it's alright
The radio spoke to a good friend of mine
And I can feel it coming up as the nights getting warm
Saw your summer dress hanging on the back of the lawn
Like a dream I remember from an easier time
With the top rolled down on a Saturday night..."
The Gaslight Anthem, "Old White Lincoln" from The '59 Sound
Sometime in early December, I gave out and hit the skids. Oh, I made it through the first anniversary of Lauren's passing with flying colors, and nine days later, on November 29th, my sister opened up her home and we had a party in honor of my daughter's fourth birthday, and we had a hell of a time that night.
The very next day I felt myself sinking, but I fought off the sinking with all my might for the next couple of weeks.
I fought on, but I began to lose the battle in the late morning hours of Thursday, December 11th. I left my house for a brief trip to the local supermarket, but on my way there I took a little detour. I drove up to the cemetery on the outskirts of town, not the one where Lauren lies, but the one next door. Hudson View Cemetery. From the ridge on the northeastern side of the cemetery one can look out and see miles of the Hudson River winding its way through the hills of upstate New York. Toward the east one can see the hills and mountains of Washington County and then, further off to the east, the Green Mountains of Vermont.
On the ridge, hundreds of old gravestones rest, many of them barely readable now. On that morning I walked through those stones and tried to decipher the names and dates inscribed upon them. Some date back to the eighteenth century but most of them commemorate lives lived in the following century. I looked at the names and the dates. A lot of men named Hiram back then, I thought. A lot of people died young back then, I thought. Many stones marking the passing of young children, many more marking the passing of young women who clearly had died during childbirth. Stones marking men who had lived through two, three, or four wives.
One monument stood out; a long, tall stone reaching far up into the sky, in honor of the first "famous" casualty of The Civil War, an officer soldier Lincoln himself took a shine to, a soldier he described as, "the greatest little man I ever met." Colonel Elmer Ellsowrth.
Ellsworth died in May of 1861, in Alexandria, the day after Virginia seceded from the Union. Ellsworth led a group of soldiers into town, and they took control of the railway station and the telegraph office. He noticed a Confederate flag flying from a hotel. Worried his already aggrieved friend Lincoln might see the flag from The White House, he entered the hotel and cut the stars and bars down. On his way out of the hotel, he was shot and killed by the hotel's owner, who was in turn killed by one of Ellsworth's men.
I looked at his monument and thought not only of him, but of his fiancee. He had been engaged to marry the daughter of a prominent Illinois businessman, but the woman's father had told them they could not marry until the colonel had achieved a higher station in society.
A little to the west of Ellsworth's grave sits a large, open field. I grew up a couple of hundred yards from that field, and in my youth, me and my friends used that space as the place for our own athletic competitions. We played baseball there in the summer, and football in the fall and winter. We built a homemade golf course there and held neighborhood versions of "The Masters" there every April. We had our "Olympics" there every fourth summer.
A couple of years ago, an old friend of ours from those days hammered a baseball bat onto the old oak tree that guards that open field. On the bat he inscribed the names of the boys who once played there. I looked at the names, about a dozen and a half of them. One of those boys left us five years ago, unable to outrun the demons of a childhood stolen from him. I saw my own brother's name on the bat and thought of how he narrowly escaped death thirteen and a half years earlier. I saw the name of another friend who has walked the same road I have, a friend who lost the love of his life in a car accident, on his own birthday.
I thought of these things and I thought of my own wife, buried now, far before her time, in a different cemetery a couple of hundred yards away. As I stood there, looking around, freezing rain began to fall, making a loud crackling sound as it pelted the barren limbs of the dead trees and the dead brown leaves strewn across the dead brown grass.
&&&&
Twelve hours later, after hours of falling ice, the power went out. I had a raging sinus infection, and all three of my children were sick, too. The sense of being alone in the world overwhelmed me. I had a house with no power and three young, sick kids, and I knew I had to make some sort of decision: do we bundle up and stay for a day or two and hope they get the power back on, or do we take off for a hotel somewhere? How do I feed them? In another life that now seemed to have happened to someone else, in some other place, I would have had a partner helping me make those decisions, but now it was all on me, and I was so sick I couldn't think straight.
We made it through the first thirty-six hours, and I cobbled together some plans to get through the Saturday night, just trying to buy myself some more time and just hoping that by some miracle the power would come back on and rescue me.
On Saturday afternoon I got them all bundled up and we drove out into the cold sunshine. I knew that the car, at least, held a reliable source of heat.
We drove across the bridge over the Hudson and out onto the back roads of Rensselaer County. Ice covered everything, and trees everywhere bent and sunk under the weight of the ice. Snapped tree limbs and downed power lines lay strewn across the landscape. The ice-covered world looked beautiful in its way, but the beauty seemed false, as it carried with it so muc hardship for so many.
We drove on. The babies fell asleep. We hit Route 40 and drove north, then east, and then headed west on Route 67, then west on 29. Passed through Cambridge, and then more farmland, and then through Greenwich. Got off the highway and drove through that town. Drove past the little all-local restaurant, the last place me and Lauren ever went out for dinner, in late August of 2007. Drove past a house we almost bought. We wound up $5,000 apart from an agreement, but we figured we'd already bent more than we wanted to, and we refused to go any further. I drove by that house, looked at it, and thought, for a mere $5,000, everything might have turned out differently: had we moved then, every other step would have been a different one, and even now, almost fifteen months on, when I look back at the unbelieveable sequence of events that took Lauren's life, it is hard for me to believe that sequence could have unfolded the same way under any other possible life scenario.
We drove on, toward Saratoga Springs. The babies woke up. My cell phone rang. My mother had news; the power was coming back on in our town, within an hour. I let out a whoop. Saved.
Evie, even at four, recognizes landmarks, and she saw where we had landed and begged me to stop "in the town to get a cookie." There's a coffee shop we hit, they sell these big chocolate chip cookies, and the kids love them. Bailey begged me not to stop, but I'd gone almost forty-eight hours without any coffee, and I could not resist a chance to score some of the black nectar. We drove in to town and parked and walked over to the coffee shop.
The kids were restless, and ignored my requests to avoid walking on the snowbanks and such. My irritation levels rose, but I thought, coffee, coffee, coffee, remain calm, coffee lies just moments away.
We entered the coffee shop after a few minutes walk. A long, long line, but by now I could smell the coffee and I could practically taste it, the way I could practically taste a long night of uninterrupted, heat-blessed night of sleep that would follow a meal cooked on my own stove.
We waited so long that at one point I muttered, to myself, what, they growing the beans back there, but we finally made it to the front, and I got three chocolate chip cookies and an extra large organic. The kids all tried to grab the bag of cookies from me but I fended them off as I added the cream and sugar to my coffee. It smelled so good I could hardly stand it. Just wait a minute, I told them, let daddy fix his coffee and then we'll find a table out front and I'll pass out the cookies.
Got out front, and I felt okay, for the first time in awhile. I put the coffee down on the table, and then the bag of cookies. Still a little sunlight in the sky, and finally, power and heat back home. The kids clamored. Hold on, I said, hold on.
Evie swiped at the bag of cookies.
She missed.
But she got my coffee.
Knocked it down, knocked the lid off. I reached for it and missed. Every last drop of it spilled out, onto the table, onto the ground, and onto the front of her jacket.
That's it, I yelled. I picked up the bag of cookies. Everybody back to the car. Now.
She started crying. Which made Riley cry. Bailey, being a little older at almost ten years and a little more well-schooled in the ways of guilt-infliction, looked at me sadly and shook his head.
"Nice going, dad. Nice. Good job. Maybe I'll ask Nana to bring us here for a cookie. She loves us. Maybe she'll take us here."
We walked to the car, me without my coffee and my kids without their cookies. Evie and Riley wailed. The cold seeped through my coat and into my arms and chest. I felt so tired and defeated and beaten I cannot even describe it. I just wanted some coffee, I just wanted my kids to have a cookie, it didn't seem like so much to ask for considering what we'd all lived through, but I couldn't make it happen.
&&&&
December marched on, relentless and freezing fucking cold. On the 19th we passed what we used to call our "other anniversary," the day in 1992 when we decided to admit to each other that we had crossed the lines of friendship and gone someplace further than that. On the 22nd I went out and shopped for their Christmas presents, a bruising, depressing and degrading experience that at one point left me, as I sat in the middle of a seemingly insurmountable mall parking lot traffic jam, banging my head against my steering wheel. On the 23rd we celebrated Bailey's tenth birthday. And then we had Christmas Eve, and then Christmas Day, and somewhere in there, I threw up my hands and gave up hope and resigned myself to a lifetime of misery and sorrow and longing.
&&&&
Somewhere in the midst of those days, stuck in my car listening to the radio, I heard a song that I wanted to hear again. A song that quoted other songs I loved, by Counting Crows abnd Bruce Springsteen, a song that said something about how somebody's boots had hit the ground and made "a high and lonesome sound." I left the station on and the deejay eventually came on and said the song was called "High Lonesome," by some band I'd never heard of called The Gaslight Anthem. Later that night, after I got the kids to bed, I went online and looked it up, and then downloaded it. High Lonesome, indeed, I thought. I got yer High Lonesome right here, pal.
&&&&
I wound up downloading the whole album, and I copied it onto a disc, and I played it nonstop in the car.
Yeah, I thought, maybe they wear their hearts and their influences a little too sloppily on their shirtsleeves, like a pair of big ol’ embarrassing ketchup stain or sumthin’, but that's how I roll, myself. Straight-ahead punk-tinged Americana power-pop laced with hints of country and old-timey Buddy Holly era rock (hey, the album ain’t called "The ’59 Sound" for nothing). All the old timeworn rock-and-roll signifiers crowd ‘round, banging up full-blast against the insides of these (mostly) tight, pulsating, three chords and a cloud of cue stick chalk dust bar band rockers: girls, the open road, love, death, failure, cars of both the classic and burned-out variety, cowboy boots, Ferris wheels, cups of coffee drunk alone and sullenly in late-nite diners, dreams, regret, heartbreak, the siren song of yesterdays, vague yearning for something unnamable, working jobs that leave you gasping for air and your sanity by the time five o’clock comes, living in boring crappy small towns, sin, redemption, and so on.
I got obsessed with it. In a good way. Because it rocks. And I needed something that rocks, to distract me from my misery and to convince me that I needed to live a little bit bigger than I had previously given myself permission to.
&&&&
Christmas week, and my boy Dan rode into town on his white horse, knowing my condition and grimly intent on doing something about it. The night after Christmas he got me out for a night of carousing, had to practically drag me out by the hair, but he got me out, we wound up closing down a Mexican-Irish joint, corned beef and cabbage quesidillas and melon margaritas, who'da thunk it, but it works, or, at least it did that night. And he got me out New Year's Eve, and then, the coup d'gras, a little New Year's Day road trip out to the casino over in Connecticut.
A three hour drive over, and we listened to nothing but The '59 Sound, while we talked about the state of my disunion.
If you love rock-and-roll music the way I do, every once in a great while, you come across a record that is exactly the record you needed to hear at exactly that point in your life, and this record was the record I needed to hear at the point in my life, at the end of, to steal a phrase from the dearly departed Hunter Thompson, "this foul year of our Lord" 2008.
&&&&
Sometimes I think that we, the left-behind-too-soon-lovers, get stuck thinking that the only thing we have to offer our dearly departeds is our suffering. Yes, our rational minds tell us that we owe it to them to live our lives to the fullest, but our hearts seem to tell us something else: namely, that we must honor their suffering with a sacrifice of our own suffering. After all, how dare I live, smile, and feel the sunshine of the world, when my sweet girl, the best thing that ever happened to me, suffered through a month-long crucifixion in a hospital bed? We fall back on suffering ourselves, because our own suffering seems the only gesture that might even remotely honor the horrific fate they suffered.
&&&&
So we listened to a record in the car for three hours and we let it sink in and then later on we sat on barstools and it was New Year's Day, and though I was always partial to U2 and the sound of Bono singing, "nothing changes, on New Year's Day," as we talked, I thought, fueled by some songs that hit me just right, might as well use New Year's Day as an excuse to at least attempt some changes, and I talked a whole lotta smack about making changes and diving in head first and so on.
&&&&
I been doing better lately. A lot better. But still, the other night, I laid in bed and read an old letter Lauren wrote me, from May of 1993. She was back home in England, I was home here in upstate New York. She'd just been over to visit me for two weeks. Pretty much the only two weeks we'd spent together as "a couple," but we knew, even then.
I put the letter down and smiled. Damn, I thought. I miss her, yes, and I always will, and she died a tragic death, but after I read that letter I thought that I was goddamn lucky to have loved like that even once in my life. I knew, we knew, even before those two weeks together, we knew from thousands of miles apart, and that is something I will always feel blessed to have lived through. We didn't get the fairy-tale ending but we had a fifteen year fairy-tale and that, I figure, is way more than some people get.
I put the letter down but still felt wide awake. I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone lying on the floor next to my bed. Springsteen on the cover, this and that inside.
And then an article..."The Last Days of Buddy Holly."
Fifty years ago this week that he died in a plane crash.
I still like lots of his stuff, and I know lots of other people who do.
And obviously the makers of my new favorite record do, too, right? I mean, "The '59 Sound?"
With the anniversary this week, I heard some Holly on the radio, and I heard "American Pie" a few times, too. The day the music died, he sang...
At the end of the Rolling Stone article, they relay a story, about Buddy Holly's widow visiting the apartment building she lived in with him in New York, all those years ago.
"I didn't think I could take it," she says. "I was weepy...and I know this sounds strange...but I felt Buddy's presence there, and I visualized him smilinf and thought I heard him say, 'Finally you came for me.'"
I'm still hooked on that damn record. The '59 Sound
I had it on in the car earlier tonight, around six-thirty. Bailey is off at my sister's with his cousins tonight, so I just had the babies with me. We hit an Italian deli up in Saratoga and I picked up some stuff to make pizza with tomorrow night, and then we hit what Evie refers to as "the beer store," to pick up a couple of sixers of the good stuff, just in case we need any this weekend.
And on the way home, I had that damn record playing, thinking disparate thoughts: thoughts of Lauren, thoughts of how much I am looking forward to gathering some of the tribe together in New York City on March 27th to see The Anthem, thoughts of what I'd read about Buddy Holly's widow a few days before, thoughts of how I am way too old, as a forty-two year old vet of marriage and widowhood, to go around telling people that a rock-and-roll record saved my life, thoughts of how Holly's presence was not just there in that apartment building but in the tunes that his musical granchildren sing out to desperate souls like mine, and I played the damn record yet again, but very light on the volume, I got babies in the car after all, but I hear a voice from the back as we drive past the Song Hill Thoroughbred farm on our way back home, the horses in the barns for the night but the moon out and its light reflecting brightly off the icy snow-covered hills, I hear a voice,
"Daddy, I like these musics, I can't hear it, I like these musics, turn it up louder so I can hear it."
And I turn it up louder, so she can hear it, and we hear it, and the moon shines off the snow, and I look out at the silhoutted hills and let the music in and all of a sudden I notice that the world looks beautiful again.