Amazing. Just when you think you’re past something, you get an echo that sets you tailspinning all over again.
I have a bad habit of not locking the keypad on my Blackberry when I stuff it into my pocket for transport out to my car. Sometimes, while it is in my pocket, it dials people up without my knowledge.
This time it dialed my ex-wife. We spoke for a few minutes, but she was busy with the move from her second-floor apartment to the floor above: unpacking those remnants of our marriage that she took with her. And I was busy with a few errands for my parents.
Then, in Walgreens on one of those errands, Heatwave’s Always And Forever came on the Muzak. “There’ll always be sunshine when I look at you…”
It’s not even like it was our wedding song; that was Louis Armstrong’s version of A Kiss To Build A Dream On. But that line, and the sentiment behind it, always seems to bring me back to the day of our wedding, a day of such promise for the future, with a woman I loved such as I had never loved before. There was, and is, sunshine in that goofy little grin of hers, and it explodes into a nova when that grin breaks out into a smile or a full-throated second-gen Italian-American laugh. It’s one of the things that attracted me to her to begin with. And on that day, always and forever seemed not just doable but inevitable for us both.
The intervening ten years of financial hardship, of an economy ground to a halt by Republican pro-business and anti-labor policies, and the physical toll it took on not just the two of us, but an entire generation who realized that theirs would be the first generation to not at least equal the level of success of their parents, slowly chipped away at and finally shattered the ice sculpture crafted on that wedding day.
And then, as it inexorably will, walking out to the car from the checkout counter at Walgreens, next up on the iPod behind my eyeballs, Photographs and Memories.
Memories that come at night
take me to another time
back to a happier day
when I called you mine…
Summer skies and lullabies
nights we couldn’t say goodbye
and of all the things we knew
not a dream survived…
But we sure had a good time when we started way back when
morning walks and bedroom talks, oh how I loved you then
I have not lost my ex-wife the way Jim Croce’s narrator did. One of the reasons we divorced to begin with was in order to preserve the friendship that otherwise would have been chipped away along with the rest of that ice sculpture. We’ve been successful at that, and can look back on the good and bad days of our marriage with a bit more wisdom and humor than we had while we were going through it.
But in listening to her tell of the emotions dredged up by the move one flight up, which has been happening now for several weeks, I find my mind drawn back to those days, and that house about an hour north and east of where I am now. My mind has begun to wander the halls and rooms of that old house: the walk-up attic, the half-finished basement, the living room we painted, the dining room a friend from church painted, the spare bedroom that was the first Sanctum Sanctorum, the spare bedroom in back that we shared when I had to work graveyard shifts at IBM, the oversized two-car garage, the back yard I mowed with vigor and the victory garden I planted.. the neighbor’s back yard I mowed when his heart didn’t feel up to the task (not that I waited to ask him how he was doing)..
As I involuntarily wander those rooms now, I encounter other people I only dimly recognize as the people who bought the house from us, when we knew we would have to sell it or else have it taken out from under us via foreclosure.
And I wonder that I ever thought I had adequately grieved the end of all that.
I look around me at the semi-organized clutter here in the basement that has become my new Sanctum Sanctorum, the space where the next @Fulcrum album is taking shape. IT contracts, let alone IT jobs, are nowhere on the horizon, and the unemployment checks are not large enough to justify getting my own place; in fact, no job I could get now would provide me with a check big enough for that without a second job and forever abandoning the musical aspirations I have held since just before I was a teenager.
Turning my back from that horizon, I have a steep mountain in front of me: the new path I have chosen to follow. No one in my family has ever been an entrepreneur, and have no advice to give me as I start on this path of self-employment other than to give it up and find a nice, safe job in IT somewhere close with benefits and a steady paycheck. And I feel those shackles around my ankles now, along with those of my own misgivings.
My parents, whose roof I share now, with their pensions and their Medicare and Social Security, do not understand the extent to which the economic climate has changed in the last thirty years since Reagan took office. I recall the night in November 1980 sitting in the student union at Emerson College with my roommate, watching the election results coming in, thinking that things were going to be very different soon. I had no idea how different, or that the effects would linger for as long as they have.
I am typing these words in someone else’s house, thinking about a house that was mine and is now also someone else’s, and I find I can’t stop the tears coming now as I remember what’s been lost and regard the mountain before me, which I must scale in order to gain even a little of that back.
And I don’t cry. I haven’t cried in so long that I’ve forgotten what that feels like, and the last time anything moved me to it.
But I am walking now through the blurred vision, with the terrain shifting in front of me as water distorts the ocular perception, and I am walking a gentle grade upward. It will get steeper, and I will not walk as quickly as I otherwise would into a new experience, until the chains around my legs begin to rust and fall away.
I have friends, including my ex-wife, to cheer me along as I begin this path, and my gratitude for their presence in my life is a comfort I cannot even express now.
And I am chanting to myself. They are the words spoken to me by my new path, the words of Usui Mikao.
The secret of inviting happiness through many blessings,
the spiritual medicine for all ailments.
Just for today,
don’t get angry
don’t worry
work diligently
be kind to yourself and others
count your blessings.
Every morning and evening,
keep these words in your heart
and chant them with your voice.
Improve your mind and body.
Here I go…
