Oh, don't carve me out! Don't let your silly dreams,
fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall.
"Bermuda Highway" - My Morning Jacket
broke my heart to leave the city we lived in for a decade, almost five years ago now, not much of a city they say, corrupt and shrinking and crumbling seemingly beyond the power of anyone to stop it, but i loved it anyway, one of the very oldest cities in nation, and it wasn't all that city-like out in the part where we lived, we had a big back yard and at night it got quiet, real quiet, and i'd stand out in that yard in the middle of the night and listen to not much, not much other than the hum of traffic rolling across a highway a mile or so away.
and i'd stare up at the branches of an old, old tree, never figured out what kind of tree it is, but oh how the branches reached high into the sky, more than twice as high as the roof of the house we lived in. during the winter you could see into the branches and spot the bird nests way up in the upper reaches, remnants of a specific spring that had passed and wouldn't ever come this way again.
my friend bob knows trees and he had some very educated guesses as to what it was, he had it narrowed down to two or three possible types, can't remember the names anymore, and he wasn't sure, but he did feel certain that it must have been something like two hundred years old. on our last night in that city, in that house where we lived five years that i had falsely assumed would stretch out into two, three, four decades, i went out back into the yard, looked around, made sure no one was watching, and i threw my arms around a little bit of the massive trunk, i hugged that old tree, and thanked it for the the company it had given me on so many nights, for the wonder it had inspired within me, for the gratitude it had provoked within me, and for shade it had given me and my wife and children and the friends and family who had gathered beneath it on pleasant days, for parties, for birthdays, sometimes for no reason at all other than that we could.
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i must have walked by that place a thousand times over the past twenty years, and all that time i never even realized an apartment sat up there on the second floor. back in the day, when my boy dan lived three doors down, the bottom floor hosted a florist shop, and then it went empty for awhile, and then an ice cream shop moved in.
she moved into that apartment almost three years ago, fresh off yet another heartbreak, off the worst one yet. she moved in and healed, the best she could. she decided to swear off this love bullshit once and for all, she knew it wasn't ever gonna work for her. some people are meant to live on their own and she had realized, against her will, that she was one of them. no more silly dreams.
maybe a little less than a year ago, after a chance meeting in a coffee shop and a group outing arranged by a mutual friend who never let on that she was trying to set us up, i asked her out on a date. sure, she said to me on the phone that night. sure. why not.
i don't even know why i asked her out: i'd sworn off the love thing, too. the death of my wife, the one woman i'd ever really loved, had sent me to places of despair i'd never even imagined existed. her death left me living in a place i could only call hell. i used to tell people that i'd never believed in hell, but now i did, for i had seen it with my own eyes. in self-defense, i walled off the innermost chambers of my heart, and swore bitterly i'd never let anyone in there ever again: i'd done so once, and though i never regretted the price i'd paid for doing so, i knew i didn't have it in me to risk paying that price again. at that point, more than two years had passed since my wife died, and i hadn't had the slightest inclination to so much as ask anyone out on a date. i don't know why i asked her out, but i did.
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that night, the first time we went out, looked a lot like tonight. a very light snow falling, leaving a slick coating on the sidewalks and the roads. i showed up a bit late, my baby boy, three and half years old at the time, had thrown my wallet behind a radiator for fun. i scrambled around in a panic, looking for the wallet, and i finally thought to ask him about it, and he laughed and told me where he'd thrown it. i picked it out of his hiding spot and ran out the door, drove in frustration down roads too slippery for overly fast movement. i got there late, saw her standing there in the coffee shop next door, gazing into the dessert display case. i apologized profusely, explained what had happened at home. she forgave me, or seemed to. we went in and saw the movie, movies, actually, the oscar nominees for best short animated film. afterward, we went out for dinner. i dropped her off at the door of the apartment in the city that i had never known existed. we shook hands, she said she'd had a great time and wouldn't mind doing it again sometime.
we did again, sometime, a week later to be exact. after a dinner at a romantic italian place, after a bottle of wine and two and a half hours of conversation, my awkward, fumbling attempt at a goodnight kiss was met with rejection, with an explanation that she didn't believe in this stuff anymore, that she hated the word dating, that she thought it best if we just became friends.
i cursed myself for letting myself think anything would come of it. when she said, well, after what you've been through, i would imagine you would want to take it slow, not get too involved. yeah, i lied, yeah, you got that right, you can't even imagine what i been through. for days afterward i broke out in involuntary cringes remembering the failed kiss, and i wrote her off, wrote it all off.
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this afternoon, at lunch, i drove on over to the state park. it's a place of sentimental value to me, and it's a short drive from the office of my new job, a job i like and which fits in well to my role as an only parent to three young children. more than twenty-five summers ago, i worked there, mowing lawns and picking up the mounds of garbage the summer concert-goers left behind, and by far the biggest were the mounds the grateful dead fans left behind for us, and how those people ever got a reputation for environmental awareness boggles my mind after witnessing the filth they thoughtlessly, almost disdainfully it seemed, left behind for us luckless, penniless locals to clean up, but that's another story.
and the story goes deeper than that, i suppose.
for years, my mother used to tell me that she sometimes used to feel her father's presence over there in that avenue of the pines. he died when she was three years old, he died in the very house where i write from tonight. she used to tell me my nana would tell her how my grandfather loved that avenue, almost as much as he loved the race track that lay a bit northwest of there, the oldest race track in america, saratoga, the one that i love, too, and the one where i could have sworn i heard him calling me occasionally over the years, call me crazy, that's alright with me.
my nana is still alive, a hundred and one years old, limping through her final days in a nursing home, an indignity to her and to the rest of us who loved her, but none of us can give her the 'round the clock professional care she requires now, her body is gone and her mind is riddled by dementia, we just can't do it, and if i feel guilty about it sometimes, which i do, i can only imagine what my mother feels, but what can we do?
one day, a few months ago, my nana started talking about my grandfather to my mother. "i told him to quit drinking, i told him to quit smoking, you think he listened to me?"
obviously he didn't.
and then she told my mother about the time that they had ventured up to the spa city for some function or other, and on the way home, my grandfather took a detour down the avenue of the pines. nana asked him where she was going. he took a little detour into the woods. the rest, as they say, is history.
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i looked out at the avenue of the pines, at the reflecting pool, at the hall of springs. god willing and the creek don't rise, as they say, i am gonna marry that girl who turned my kiss a few months ago at that very reflecting pool three months from now.
i look around at the brick buildings, at the grounds, covered with snow. the afternoon lays there quietly, carrying with a beautiful gloom. the springtime seems impossible rather than inevitable. i think sadly about a cousin of mine, just diagnosed with some sort of awful cancer. we don't know the score for sure at this point, but it doesn't look good. he's not much older than me. two years, maybe three, i can't remember. i cross my fingers for him, hope against hope he can be here in may.
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my mother grew up in this place, five kids, there's only three here now and it seems packed, but they did it, and she speaks well of those times. yeah, they had some silly dreams, too, like the one my nana and grandfather had that involved sending my mother off to college some day, but that silly dream and a lot of other ones too died off the night my grandfather died in what i now call my bedroom.
to make more space in here we finally, as i'd wanted for so long, to rearrange the kids' bedroom spaces, and while i was at work today, my mother and father moved evie and riley into one room togther and bailey out from a sad excuse of a bedroom, one the kid never complained about, to his eternal credit, into a more suitable room. his old room we, or should i say, they, turned into a playroom.
evie and riley were riven with excitement about the prospect of rooming together. my father came over around bedtime and we drank some wine and talked about how far we've all come, and then i put them to bed. "we gotta sing together, now, dad!" evie cried out, giggling as she said the words.
"dad?" she asked with a huge smile.
"what?"
"is sheila moving in tomorrow? is she?"
"yeah. she's moving in."
"oh, dad, i'm so happy!"
the look on her face, well, it took my breath away. at that moment, at this moment in time, life looks like magic to her, and no dream looks too silly.
they crawled into their beds, and we sang, and oh, the smile on that girl's face, oh, how she looked like her mother, and for the first time since i can remember, as she sang the final songs of the day, i choked back my tears, and thought, oh, how i wish their mother could see them, could hear them, right now.
we finished the songs and as i walked out of what is now their room, i heard riley say to evie, "let's talk!" and they talked, they talked about what might happen tomorrow, and i wanted to cry again, and i saw my dad sitting at the table, eating some dinner i'd cooked the night before, and i wanted to let it go, in front of him, i wanted him to tell me it was ok to let it go, but i couldn't do it, he seemed happy and pleased sitting there with good food and a decent glass of wine in front of him, and he's done enough, i thought, more than i ever could have asked, so i wiped my eyes on the sleeves of my sweatshirt and acted like nothing had happened.
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she's moving out of that apartment i never even knew was there until i met her. tonight's her last night there. i wonder now, deep into the night, what she's thinking now, if she's awake. i wonder if she's reflecting back on the past few years, i hope she's not having doubts. she's leaving that city i once lived in for this place i call home. i think of her place, i think of the living room, i think of the spot in there where, last may, i grabbed her hands and pulled in to me and kissed her. that time, she didn't turn me down, but she stopped, soon into it, to tell me she felt scared. i sat her down on the couch, the old couch we'll throw out into the garbage pile on sunday morning, and asked her why she felt scared. she told me why, and the fears made sense. i told her that life would get you either way, no matter how much you tried to duck and cover.
it makes nothing more than sense to be scared of everything, doesn't it? life carves you up or carves you out, on a dime, without warning and out of nowhere it ruthlessly disposes of your silly dreams, makes a mockery of them.
but she's moving out of the city tomorrow anyway, she's moving in, and we're getting married. we got our silly dreams, we dream about forty years, we know we must be out of our minds, lord knows i seen so much as to know better than to dream of forty years, nobody our ages gets forty years, we'll be lucky to get twenty, but so what, we're gonna take those silly dreams and run with 'em, i am gonna take those silly dreams to bed with me tonight and hold on to them like my life depends on it, because, i suppose, it does.