Aging Near Christmas – Repost

Being a December baby (Sagittarius?  Bad with money! someone once noted with great alarm), with a sister born in July, I was under constant threat, as a child, of her receiving more presents than I was.  It’s a psychological condition endemic to all those born in mid- to late-December who have siblings born in other months; we simply cannot help feeling as though our siblings get the spotlight twice a year, whereas we have to settle for the equivalent of a long weekend.  We are more likely to suffer from sports-related injuries or have sustained conditions such that our parents will dote upon us unexpectedly or in constant, low-level amounts throughout the year.

I was unequivocally closer to thirty than to twenty.  This was not new; it was the second year that this was the case, but that might have made it worse.  The weekend in which I turned twenty six passed without incident; a friend who had promised to organize some form of communal binge drinking instead spent it exclusively with her boyfriend, leaving me to toe the line of alcoholism while I judiciously downed bourbon in my apartment.  My rabbit hopped around and chewed on things she shouldn’t have while I read about barbarians.

Days later, I was back in the home of my upbringing, in a new kitchen, up since three or four in the morning (the alarm was set for four; the snowplows set to work about an hour before; I looked out my window, saw little sign of snow).  It was Christmas Eve, and we had exchanged presents, eaten dinner, and been meandering slowly through my parents’ wine collection (provided from the Co-Op across the street from me four hours to the north).

All had gone to bed except my father and me.  My sister’s boyfriend, who I had mistakenly referred to as my brother-in-law hours earlier as I purchased cuff-links for him after a weekday matinee, had left his computer downstairs, after setting up something for the lot of us to watch.  I suppose he ran out of steam, or was fearful of leaving my sister alone in the house full of animals.

On the computer, my father and I were watching the 1994 Stanley Cup Final, game seven, in which the New York Rangers, my favorite team, won the Cup for the first time in fifty-four years.  That year, I was in middle school, and would wear hockey jerseys to school and punch my friends in the arm whenever the Rangers won a game during the playoffs (the understanding being that they could do likewise when the Rangers lost; we compared bruises in gym class).  It was a particularly hard fought year; many series had gone to seven games and several to multiple overtimes.

Game six and seven of the semi-finals were quite dramatic; the combined positive thinking of New York fandom and the hopeful youth of Connecticut suburbia were enough to carry the Rangers past the Devils after a memorable timeout in the third period of game six, in which Coach Mike Keenan said absolutely nothing to his players, and in game seven, when in double overtime, Stephane Matteau scored his controversial wraparound goal, for weeks the subject of great debate.

(A seventh grader can be a hockey fan, and a devout one at that, but he still, legally speaking, does not have rights.  Therefore, his petitions for a revocation of curfew during such important events as game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, need not be heeded, if, in fact, his homework was not yet complete or it was past ten p.m.  In the spring of 1994, my homework for seventh grade science had not been touched, and it was approaching ten in the evening.

I rose the next morning to see Mark Messier, the captain of the team, jumping in mid-air on the front page of the Sports section of the Hartford Courant, after the third Ranger goal was scored, the one that would carry the day.  I would see him jumping on camera on the morning news, along with the flash bulbs as the somewhat sloppily shot puck slid past the Vancouver goalie Kirk McLean.  The evening before, I saw the panoramic shots of Madison Square Garden, the packed stadium, the various signs and garlic placed all around the plexiglass, but it was soon past my bedtime, or at least it was a night in which my parents made me turn in early.)

My father and I sat, with our stem-less wineglasses sitting on the still-new-to-me countertops that they had installed back in 2006, fixed on the computer monitor, watching this fifteen year old game that I had never seen in its entirety, but was one of the greatest moments for me as a young player.  We commented on the Russians, on the skill of Ranger goalie Mike Richter, of the wise penalty that Esa Tikkanen took by hooking Pavel Bure (which resulted in the Canucks’ second and final goal of the game), and on the general pleasure of watching good hockey, now that I now longer played competitively, and my father was no longer a hockey parent.

We watched the whole damned game, all three periods of it, never fast forwarding through, even though we knew they won.  Even after the score had settled into its final, undisturbed states of 3-2 Rangers, we watched, tensing up each time the Canucks shot, somewhat hopeful each time that Alexei Kovalev of the Rangers carried the puck into the offensive zone and got a pass off to Adam Graves.  We cringed when Craig MacTavish, the last player in the NHL to play without a helmet, went crashing into the Vancouver net.  And we were quick to comment on the bad refereeing toward the end of the game, with two relatively poor icing calls.

Fifteen fricking years later, I had finally seen the Rangers win the Stanley Cup.  My father got up as soon as the game was over.  I watched the celebrations, the destitute Canucks sulking, the shaking of hands, the confetti (my God, the confetti).  My father fed the cats, spoke to a few of them briefly, went to bed.  He showed me where the switch was for the lights he was leaving on in the kitchen.  I went for a glass of water, hoping to stave off the headache that was speedily coming my way.

Part of the Argument

I had gathered no evidence when presented the opportunity over the last couple of years, but that did not shake my conviction that my parents were farting more with age.  The initial shock at their frequency had diminished, and my sister and I had stopped making a note of it out loud to one another or to my mother and father when we found ourselves at home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, funerals, or other moments of great import.

I had only started tracking since I had graduated from college four and a half years prior.  I’m sure that if I had started earlier in my life, while in high school, I could have compiled a rather robust data set, which I could have then contributed to a medical or environmental journal at the humble price of being cited when the article on human aging, flatulence, and the effects on climate change.

I had been more consciously collecting data not on a physiological, but rather a marital phenomenon: the number of times that my mother and father would raise their voices in front of their two children.  I did my best not to take sides when this happened, instead issuing an impersonal, loud Would you two shut up, sometimes introducing the request with the epithet Children, and sometimes adding in a the fuck for flavor, and to see if they would tell me not to cuss so much, a situation which I welcomed but which never arose.

With little success, I had told my mother two summers ago that I didn’t want to hear her talk about my father in disparaging terms or tell me the various ways in which their marriage was failing (each with a corresponding reason as to why she wasn’t actively pursuing divorce (her favorite being the cost of insurance for a self-employed woman in her sixties with a pre-existing condition)), or how she was still waiting for the right moment to move out (the most believable of which was when my sister graduated from College, which had now happened a year and a half ago).

Get divorced or stop talking about, I said.  Come to think of it, just stop talking about it anyway.

You’re just like him, she replied, a common response for when I didn’t agree with her (You try living with him, was another favorite.  My silent reply was that I did for 17 years).

She had stopped talking about the shit state of affairs to me personally, so in that respect, I was successful.  She had taken a very narrow reading of my request, however, as she had taken to narrating out loud, in front of whoever happened to be within earshot.  On this particular day after Christmas, it was my sister, her boyfriend, my father and myself, listening to a somewhat minor scuttle about a somewhat unmeasured response to my mother accidentally stepping on a blueberry in the kitchen.

My sister and I had already witnessed heated discussions carried out in front of us on my mother’s sleeping problems and medication regimen, the unreliable nature of her friends, and who took better care of the universally overweight cat population.  The day prior, as everyone but my sister made our way through a number of bottles of sparkling wine that we later stopped counting, her boyfriend found that he had front row seats to what was for us siblings a rerun.  I’m not certain my sister had primed him on what he would likely observe when he spent more than twenty minutes with my mother and father in a non-group setting.  He handled it well, at least publicly.

My sister and her boyfriend were making preparations to leave on the morning of the twenty-sixth.  They had to pick up the keys to their new apartment, in anticipation of the movers showing up the next morning.  I was to help my father move a bookcase out of my dead grandfather’s apartment.  My parents were having trouble selling the apartment, and were apparently furious at the board and administration of the building; at least they were able to unite around common enemies.  My father had just plowed the driveway, and was apparently loading the minivan up with trash for a visit to the landfill.

This was apparently the source of great conflict.  I had been playing piano and had not heard any commotion.  I had received a hand signal from my father giving me a five minute warning before we were to leave.  I played one more song, put on shoes and a jacket, and entered into a veritable shitstorm.

My mother and father were arguing about the logic of my father and I stopping at the landfill on the way to move the bookcase.  There was also some athletic disagreement on why it was imperative that we dispose of two VCRs and a computer printer on this particular day.  It was necessary to raise voices, and for my mother to add commentary that had nothing to do with the landfill visit, inspiring boisterous rebuttals from my father.  The electronics would only add on a few extra minutes, she explained.  Minutes mattered, however, in his estimation.

I need to get him back here for lunch at one! my father exclaimed, either looking or pointing at me.

Great, I thought.  I am now part of the problem.  I tried to explain that I could probably delay lunch with a friend in town.  I’m not certain he heard me.

The argument spilled over into the garage, as my sister and her boyfriend packed the last remaining items in their car, and then just looked on from the driveway, trying not to make eye contact, for fear of turning attention towards them.

My mother asked me to put two of the items in the car instead of three; she believed this to be a workable compromise (Jeff, since your father is refusing, could you please put the printer and one of the VCRs in the car).

My father yelled at someone:  I don’t want those in my car. And then, when the request was repeated, I’m not dropping those off.

I stood frozen between the two of them:  he was closer to his van, and my mother closer to the entrance to the house.  I was standing between their cars, and was trying to articulate that I was not going to take sides.  I think I was only able to lift up my arms in a questioning manner, mouthing inaudible words that weren’t even entirely clear in my head.

Finally, Put them in the frickin’ car, from my father’s corner.  I was surprised he did not just say fucking; it could have been because of my sister’s boyfriend, but I can’t be sure.  He had certainly not been shy about using the word in front of my ex-girlfriend a few years ago.  So I obeyed, and stacked the printer and VCRs in the backseat of the van.

Frickin’ ridiculous, he fumed as he stomped around, directionless for a moment.

My sister and her boyfriend, having seen the making of a fragile ceasefire, decided to seize on the opportunity to make an exit, an intention that they were polite enough to narrate out loud.  Everyone shook hands with an awkwardness that bordered on cinematic in its beauty.

I then took a seat in the van.  My mother went to get the cookies we were supposed to give to my dead grandfather’s still living neighbor, and my father went with shovel in hand to where a car had just been parked.

I think I’m just going to move to Gramps’ place, she said, referring to my dead grandfather’s apartment which they were having trouble selling.  I think that’s the easiest thing to do, she repeated, to no one in particular.  My sister and her boyfriend had already left to drive back to Massachusetts and I had closed the door to my father’s minivan.  My father was shoveling the driveway where their car had been, likely out of earshot, especially when considering that his hearing was declining, despite his insistence to the contrary.  I suppose I was the intended audience.  I buried my nose inside the neck of my jacket and put my feet on the dashboard.

I don’t deserve this, she half-yelled, half-sung, and closed the door the house in such a way that fell short of slamming, but was a few notches above civil and orderly conduct.

I’m fairly certain that my father heard neither her conclusion of undeservingness nor the door; it could have been that she wanted only me to hear, in her unflagging efforts to recruit me as an ally.  My father returned the shovel, and got in the car, huffing, but was otherwise silent.  He navigated the slushy suburban roads, and the car began to smell slightly of household refuse and cat food cans.  Neither of us spoke until we were able to change the subject.

Lessons Before June

It had all played out beautifully for the advanced eighth graders at Avon Middle School – after surviving Mr. Loman’s 6th grade math class in which we wrestled with the commutative and associative properties and did great battle with the distributive property, we were whisked through seventh grade, taught by a silver-haired woman with gaudy jewelry whose name eludes me with little to report on the subject.  Mr. Fuller, my English teacher that year, who was one of those teachers who was born to do exactly what he was doing, commanded more of my attention than linear equations and x-y graphs.  In that final year of that donut-shaped school, though, math was once again exciting, as the advanced students had the joy and privilege of studying with Mr. Daigle, an average height, average build man (maybe a football player in his past life; he had broad shoulders) with blondish hair and a light colored mustache to match.

We called him Daddy Daigle, probably not yet knowing that this was called alliteration (or maybe we learned it later that year).  The nickname was accurate:  he was a kind man, with a gentle voice whose somewhat high register betrayed his otherwise imposing-to-us figure.  He wore loafers and a collared shirt every day, probably with khakis recycled throughout the week that our adolescent eyes did not catch.  It was our last year in this circular school; puberty was in full swing for both genders to our amazement, but our sense of fashion lagged greatly.  We were still reliant upon the well-intentioned tastes of our parents for picture day.  In certain, disastrous cases, we had parents who were more or less deferent to what our demographic thought was cool.  The yearbooks from that epoch proved, if nothing else, that it was impossible to be attractive with nascent or full blown acne, large glasses and braces, no matter what one wore.  It was a fantastic time for all of us.

The highlight of that particular math class was creating tetrahedral kites from drinking straws, tissue paper and floss, a prelude to ninth grade geometry.  It was our final project for the class, and we flew the kites out on the fields which bordered West Avon Road one spring afternoon.  We kept our kites, proud of that which we had rendered with crude raw materials, until zealous mothers bade that we discard of them, as they took up too much space in either our childhood closets or the shared spaced of the basement.  Either that or they disappeared without notice or comment.

My standing with Daddy Daigle had greatly improved since earlier in the season, which is the focus of this entire story.  I do not remember what exactly what we were learning but I do recall that it was quickly going over my head, and, to make matters worse, my father was no longer able to help me (we had had enough trouble muscling our way through the distributive property together; the quadratic equation was a different universe with too many variables; the plus/minus sign served only to make things only more unpleasant).  Being the grade obsessed child that I was, exacerbated by the fact that my graduating class happened to be particularly intelligent (what a drag), I resorted to drastic measures.

In class, we sat four to a table.  I’m guessing we were twenty strong at five tables, but that is just an estimate.  I sat at the table second furthest from the door to the classroom, and, given my seat, was probably furthest from the chalkboard.  During tests, we would set up brown dividers which for some reason had fake grain on them to make them look like wood although they were cardboard, so that we could not look over at our peers to copy their answers.  Or, if we did, it would be made painfully obvious; given the height of our chairs, we would have had to crane our necks in such a manner that would have made subtlety impossible.

The way around it, however, as my friend and table-mate Brian would discover, was to slide our tests under the divider to avoid detection.  Brian sat to my right, and both of us faced Daddy Daigle’s desk, so during tests, we knew we had to be sly to avoid detection.  The slide method seemed to be the solution.  The relationship slowly began to sway in my favor as Brian’s understanding of these eighth grade concepts continued to develop while my own steadily declined.

I think it was a small, individual study room, with no windows and a small table with some things taped to the wall, adjacent to the classroom.  We sat perpendicular to one another, Daddy Daigle on one of the long ends of the table, and me on one of the short ends, closest to the door.  It wasn’t during class time; he had asked if I could meet with him individually during a study hall or something like that.

He had caught me cheating; he had seen me looking at Brian’s answers from across the room for the whole test.  He dove into the wrongness of cheating, of how it was not a good show of character.  He then talked about tires.  Had I heard about the Firestone recall?  It was the same idea:  the company had cheated and now innocent consumers were being seriously injured or killed as a result.  When he asked me if I had heard, I told him I had heard about the problems, but not about the recall.  I remember a comic about it in the tire shop in town, taped to the counter.  It was a revelation to me that if I continued to behave in such a way that, I would likely cause car crashes, be on the news, be blamed for flipping SUVs, and be responsible for destroying lives.

He was giving me a zero on the test.  As an act of charity, however, he wouldn’t tell my parents this time; he trusted that I would learn from this mistake and cease copying my neighbor’s answers.  He might have inferred this from the fact that my face was red and swollen and I was at this point sobbing in earnest.  I probably apologized, and he probably said that that was not the point.

At some point, the meeting ended; I left the windowless room to go scrutinize myself in the bathroom mirror down the hall.  I don’t recall if my grades improved or suffered, but at least a few months later I got to fly a kite.

A Family Dinner

Around the table, it was:  a retired banker who was in his time in charge of disaster recovery and continuity management, a real estate agent in the midst of losing her mind, a kindergarten teacher, a third year law student, and a college fundraiser.  It was the first time that we were together since we buried my grandfather’s ashes in July from the body that died in March and was cremated soon after.  We had to wait for the thaw, and then for a weekend that worked for us all to have a memorial.

Here, though, it was fall, and my parents, my sister and her boyfriend were visiting, at the peak of the autumnal colors.  We were seated last among several parties that arrived between 7:25 and 7:35, owing, probably, to the fact that we were five, and not the standard two or four.  I was in acute state of undeniable sobriety, sustained only by the fact that I was racing the coming week, and was off the bottle, itching hourly to get back on.  My mother’s provocations (“You can have one drink”) did not aid in the slightest.  Intoxication made these family weekends more tolerable; things were off to a shaky start.

While we waited for our drinks (a mojito, something that was champagne based, another that was scotch based, and my unsweetened iced tea) and my sister fingered her water glass as though it contained some secret message, my mother commented positively on the ambiance and the arrangement on the table.  We touched it, to discern if it was real.  We discerned that it was not.  The mojito was sent back (the prognosis was cheap rum), and exchanged for a blueberry martini, which received passing marks.

The highlight of the evening, however, was the soup, ordered by my mother and sister.  It had happened that the original soup of the day was a pumpkin bisque, but due to its overwhelming popularity, it had been consumed in its entirety by earlier clients.  As such, it was a cream of mushroom which was served, without their being informed.  We all took turns trying to figure out why the soup was not orange, but rather a greenish brown.  Democratically, we decided that it was the herbs and spices.  The evaluation from my mother “good, but maybe a little too gourmet for me.”

It was not until later, when we had overheard another table bring up the fact that her soup was not orange that we learned of the error.  And the fight was on.  Through several pointed but not quite direct inquiries, my mother extracted from another waitress a confession that a mistake had been committed and an apology for doing so.  I did not expect my sister’s boyfriend, up until now a somewhat-quiet-because-he-was-bad at-normal-conversation-with-humans-and-more-than-slightly-overweight type, to get as animated as he did, but no sooner had there been an apology that he began asking the waitress what would have happened if someone had been allergic, and asserted that they should not be charged.

Things escalated; our original server came out, apologized, received more invective testimony from the law student, who informed her that while he was not certain about Vermont, in Massachusetts, it was a board of health mandate that consumers be informed of such changes; after all someone could have died here.  Our server left to go cry in the kitchen to fellow wait staff, and summoned the owner who offered her own, apologies, who informed us the soup was free, and who patiently listened while the law student kept going, and while my mother informed her that she did not want the server to feel upset, but rather wanted the owner and the server to know that above all, she felt dumb for not knowing what she was eating.

I cut everyone off, told my sister’s boyfriend and my mother that there was nothing left to discuss:  our soups were free, the evening had thus far passed without any occurrence of anaphylactic shock, and our entrees were consumed without incident.  The owner thanked me, and once the seated members at the table agreed, or were forced by my death stares into agreement, she retreated.

My sister began to cry, we looked at the dessert menu out of obligation, and then asked for the check.

Antacids

In the week after she left, I had my first case, albeit self-diagnosed, of heartburn.  I came home to an empty apartment on a Monday afternoon, the only noise to displace the sound of my own footsteps being that of my pet rabbit, scurrying about in her cage, and being the not-yet-spayed female that she was, compulsively making nests which would inevitably spread onto the carpet.  I dropped my bag on the floor and greeted with a not-quite-sad face the thud sound that I expected, along with a clinging noise that I did not expect – I had forgotten that I had a glass mixing bowl in my overnight bag, for reasons which eluded me at that moment.

The week passed without incident:  we talked daily, ending each conversation with the truth that we missed each other, that we loved each other.  I kept up my training in martial arts and in running to prevent myself from having any free time to think about my lot.  Overall, it was a wise strategy.  The bed, as I looked at it each evening after turning on the bedroom lights, too large for just me, sat there, also wondering where the second person was.  It had been over a year that it had supported the weight of two people, with the exception of my somewhat frequent business travel.

And then, on Thursday evening towards eleven o’ clock, friends began arriving.  A college buddy, one of the best, a housemate my senior year, was to be married.  Weddings in the years since graduation, proved to be one of the large unifiers for a geographically dispersed group of friends, and this one proved to be no exception.  I had fallen asleep in the living room / dining room space in my apartment while reading a book when I received a phone call that the foursome, two married couples, three of which had graduated from Middlebury with me and all four of which I had known for years, had arrived safely, had parked, and were shuttling their air mattresses, and bags towards the apartment.  I welcomed them in; we gave each other the 5 minute catch up, discussed logistics for the weekend, and turned in.

On Friday, two other friends, also housemates during that fourth year of our undergraduate tennure, arrived, and on Saturday, three more ended up taking up space in the apartment, bringing the total number to ten, including myself, who, for the wedding weekend, called this small space home.  At the evening dance after the wedding, the bride came up to me and thanked me for hosting what amounted to more than ten percent of all the wedding attendees.

It was at that dance, once the bride and groom had hours prior successfully completed the several month regimen of preparing for and executing their wedding, that I, on a phone call with my lover, now reduced to a voice on the phone, a picture on my wall, and a daydream at my job, first noticed the burning in my chest.  I noted this out loud.  She sounded concerned.

“I think it’s because I haven’t drunk since you left,” I offered, thumping my chest with a closed fist as an acidy wave rose up.  We said good night, the burning continued, and I decided to dance it off to a funk band that during their breaks were replaced by a computer.

The next day, my friends had left and in the middle of a long run, I again began to experience the burning.  When I returned home to the once again empty apartment, I tried pushing back the pain with water and Gatorade as I stretched.  On the phone with her soon after, she began reading the possible causes of acid reflux, which included increased consumption of alcohol, and increased consumption of food, both of which had occurred over the weekend.  I thought about it, about the fact that I had a condition whose miracle cures were heavily advertised in magazines and on televisions, a frowning father at the dinner table, a woman touching her chest, clearly distraught, and a large, a improbably large purple pill splashing onto the screen, or a total eclipse of the sun followed by the trade name of another tablet which promised relief.

After a quick shower, having spoken to her, and as a team having diagnosed what I suspected to be heartburn, I set off to the supermarket in search of antacids.  It was Sunday evening and the supermarket was mostly empty aisles fully stocked.  A few shoppers frantically searched for an item without which dinner could not occur and a few college-aged students scanned the prices on butter and eggs, working out which was the best deal.  I stood in the aisle which housed the pharmaceuticals, hemming and hawing about how many tablets I needed, especially given that it was my hope that this new condition would be temporal.  Economies of scale triumphed, however, and I got a thin cardboard box of thirty generic pills.

I paid and walked home.  In the kitchen, as evening began hinting that it was on its way, I popped the beige colored tablet out of its foil, swallowed it down, and marveled at the fact that I was aging, that I was alone, and that that was probably a good thing, because honestly, who wants to love a twenty something with heartburn.

Prologue to my memoir:

This is a revised prologue to a memoir that I am currently rewriting/editing.  Enjoy!

—

Prologue:  And then there was light

I knew it would take years before I could engage the subject of Isabel.  I did not, do not want, to demonize her.  I loved her, even as it ended.  Even as we sobbed into the phone on our last day as a couple, I loved her.

Was it dysfunctional?  Yes, but dysfunction fails to distinguish it from others.  Was it abnormal?  Probably, but only in its intensity, which flowed up into unsurpassed moments of elation, and down, into a universe of self-abuse to which I had never before, and would never again, subject myself.

*

We walked into the terminal, necks craned up, looking for international departures, then, having located those signs, looking for the Lufthansa queue.  It was mid-October of 2004, the last day that her 3 month visitor status was valid.   One more day, and she would be illegal.  I had driven back to Connecticut two days prior, nursing a cold.

She had already complete packing, and as we were about to leave to drive her to the airport, she decided to check her e-mail.  There was a message.  It was from ESPN.  She had not gotten the job, despite the strength of her interviews.  A question of paperwork, of work status, it being October.  She began crying, right there.  I said something about other opportunities.  She said I was nuts, that this was her only hope.  It was borderline true – getting a job at ESPN was where she had focused nearly all of her job search efforts.  And close she came, but bureaucracy had the final say, and there we were, staring at the message, that they were sorry not to be able to move forward with her application.

“I’m never coming back,” she said.  I tried to console her, but I wasn’t even sure I believed myself.  She’d have better luck finding work in Europe.  She had family there, she had friends there.  Here, she was living with my parents.  She felt isolated.  She hadn’t found work.

So, this is really it, I thought.  She wouldn’t be coming back.

We punctuated the two hour car ride to the airport with a back and forth as to how we’d make it work.  When we’d see each other, how often, saving money, and me assuring her not to give up hope, that there would be other chances at finding a job here in the US.  Her scorning my pointless optimism, and me falling silent when she asked where were there jobs for her and how was she supposed to get them and what was I doing to help?

I watched her in line, back and forth with the Lufthansa agent.  She got her ticket and walked towards me.  Just over a year ago, I had met her.  She was the same, petite, black haired and olive skinned woman here in the airport as she was at Les Halles in Central Paris.  Same deep set eyes, same small hands, same attributes that drew me to her on a night when the museums were open late.  She looked a little more tired.  She looked at me.  She put her arms around me.  We were standing on top of a map of the world.  We were crying.

“No me dejes,” she implored.

“No te voy a dejar,” I said.

“Prométeme.”

“Te prometo, te juro.”

She said good-bye one last time.  We kissed, we kissed again, she turned around, and she was gone.

I would never see her again.

In December of that year, a month after I, in the form of a transatlantic phone call, terminated our relationship, I received two letters from her in close succession.  The first noted how in the weeks since the breakup, she had come to the epiphany that it was all her fault, and that she wanted me to know she had realized it only now.  The second wished me a Happy Birthday.  I held on to both, at least through graduation from Middlebury in May.

Her older brother sent me a message in the spring of 2005, the semester of my graduation, informing me that it wasn’t right of me to have left Isabel and only to cut myself off from her so completely, from blocking her on MSN Messenger, to not replying to her letters.  I should be a bigger man, and face it down.  This was the singular communication that I would have with him.  I unblocked Isabel from MSN Messenger, informed her by way of an e-mail that her brother had contacted me, and within the week, she wanted to talk about things.  We did so online.

She dove right into it:  was I with someone else?

I asked her why she would think that.  She had heard from sources she refused to divulge.  I told her that I was, that I had been for some time.  That yes, I was in love.  How could I, so soon after the breakup, she wanted to know.

So I told her:  “I just wanted to be happy.”

We were together eleven months.  I avoided thinking of her for years; I distilled my bitterness, fell in love again, and got a job.  But she remained in my brain, a whisper and then a scream, the possessor of my year in Paris – mostly lost but not forgotten.

The Only Man He’d Known From Iowa

I sit in the combined living and dining room of my grandfather’s apartment, where he’s lived since my grandmother died. He keeps the apartment very warm, such that my mother, when we visit, shakes the hair that falls on her neck as she brings his laundry back up from the basement.

“You should go see him,” my mother says the Saturday after Thanksgiving. “It means a lot to him.”

So I am there, with Ashley, who is meeting him for the first time. I don’t preface the visit with much; my mother has told Ashley about him already, all the back story she’d need for a quick visit to West Hartford.

When he expects company, the door is always left ajar. Still, I knock. I always do.

He tells us to come in, sing-songy. Whenever we visit, when he first sees us, it’s always, “Hey!” as though the announced visit were a total surprise.

I kiss his cheek and he kisses mine; he grabs my forearm, as though for support, even as he is seated in his overstuffed chair from which he watches television. Ashley takes a seat by my side on the couch.

He asks Ashley where she’s from. She says Iowa.

One of his shipmates on the USS Baltimore, the Heavy Cruiser which took FDR to Alaska, was from Iowa. He was teased quite a bit, for reasons I can’t quite remember, but it might have been the way he pronounced his A’s, something physical which invited attack, or, simply, some joke about corn gone a few iterations too far.

“Well, he got so frustrated he took out a knife,” he says. Ashley says wow, or oh my God.

He goes on to tell how he was the one that diffused the situation. He had settled them down. He didn’t get into great detail as to how it happened, but the shipmate from Iowa did not stab anyone.

“He’s the only man I knew from Iowa.”

Soon thereafter, I rise to leave, anxious to get on the road, Ashley rising in turn.

“See you soon, Gramps,” I say.
“Hey! Good to see you!”

His head turns to Ashley: “Come back soon, and we can talk more about Iowa!” He makes some reference to corn.

She smiles, and indicates she’ll see him soon.
The chance would never come, and the next time that Ashley would see my grandfather, his lips were sewed shut, and he was dressed in a suit that he hadn’t worn in years; we covered him with an American flag.

In Coastal Maine

A number of relatives knew only to start crying when they saw my grandfather, who, in the two years since his last pilgrimage to Maine, could now only walk three steps before needing a rest, and lived only with the aid of oxygen, monitored with great diligence by my mother who had done most of the planning for the trip.

We were there, at the family cemetery in Thomaston, to bury the ashes of my mother’s mother, my grandfather’s high school sweetheart in the late 30s, and his wife by 1980.  The pastor read the twenty third psalm without the letter R, and my grandfather, after some brief remark from my mother, told the small gathering about my grandmother next to a fallen redwood, claiming the photograph to be proof that she was the happiest gal you ever would meet, before the exertion and tears forced him to stop.

At the family cottage, twenty minutes away, at dinner, my family, with the exception of my grandfather, proceeded to imbibe with great zeal, and lighting citronella candles to fend off the persistent mosquitoes, we spread ourselves out, my father all the while the merry bartender.  It was a gathering of people you really only see at marriages and funerals, or in Florida, in February, to escape New England winters.

I myself turned in once one of my cousins began running shirtless around the kitchen, showing us a tattoo on his left shoulder.  It was after that point that he composed an open letter to us all that suggested that, now that Marie was gone, there was little need to maintain the falsehood that we enjoyed each other’s company.

Allahna on the Map – Part III

Allahna on the Map, Part III

Somehow, almost two years went by without seeing her and without any significant exchange, except for one morning when I was traveling in San Francisco in October of 2008, and right before a meeting, she called; I had to go; I returned her call; she wasn’t there.

2009 arrived, and so did the month of May.  It was a Thursday.  I missed a phone call from her; on Saturday, she was driving somewhere south, in order to fly to Iraq.  She would serve there for a year.  She was calling everyone she cared about to let them know the news, and to apologize for not being in better touch this past year, life’s been crazy, but things are good, she’s fine, it’s been an emotional month, and she’d love a phone call or a text if I could manage it between now and Saturday; she’d be driving all day.

So I sent her a message on Friday morning, asking when I should call her.  She called me back immediately.

I was at my office; I closed my door, and looked out the window at the small parking lot straddling the building.  I’m not certain I was the best listener this time around, as I was trying to monitor the volume of my voice, as it was a personal call at work, and so I cannot reproduce verbatim the conversation.  Which is unfortunate.

I can, nonetheless, attempt to reconstruct the content of the conversation successfully:

—

It has been a month or so of up and down.  One moment she is fine, another she is crying for no reason.  In yet another, she is cursing.

She clarifies the moment at which a picture was taken during an amorous tryst with her ex-fiancé.  My timing, it appears, was slightly off when I wrote about it at first.  She laughs about, indicates that it’s fine, and that she’s surprised that I remembered that detail, and is happy to be reminded of it.

She remembers one of the chapters I’d written about her, but wants me to send her both of them again.  I promise to comply as our conversation continues.

She’s going to serve as military police, as she understands it, which she thinks she does, in the town where Saddam was hung, or near there.  She will be working in a prison.  That makes me think about the photos revealed to the world in the spring of 2004.  She’s better than that, I tell myself.

She expresses her happiness with her new boyfriend who isn’t new anymore.  He just isn’t her ex-fiancé.  Which is good, that fuck up.  We don’t get into it.  But no, this new boy is pretty great, and pretty understanding.  She is excited for me to meet him.  I am, too, I suppose, but I don’t vocalize it.

The deployment will last about a year.  It is a long time, she affirms.  And when she gets back, she plans on jumping in a car and driving up to see me again.  Because it was a good time last time.  Almost two years ago?  No shit.  It has been that long.  She apologizes again for not keeping in better touch, especially the time I drove to Connecticut to see her after her fiancé converted himself into her ex-fiancé.  In general, too, though.  Life’s been crazy, fucken work was nuts, didn’t have any free time, and when she did, she was too tired, you know how it is.  There’s no need to worry, I say.  Life happens, I say.  I probably say some other things, too.

I’ve still got to write this book, she says.  I ask if she still wants me to continue writing about the stories she tells.  She says yes, that we have to work on that when she’s back and we see each other again.

So you’ll come up to Vermont, again, I ask.  She confirms.  You bet, Honey.  That’s good, I reply; it’s been too long, and I’d love to see you.  You going to be okay?  Yeah, I’m going to be okay.

The conversation winds down; she is bringing a webcam with her and a computer, so she hopes to keep in touch.  I can always e-mail her, too, she informs me.  She will try to respond when she has time.  Do I have to get back to my job, she asks.  I say that I should, but I’m glad that we connected.  I wish her well.  She wishes me well.  The line is cut, and the parking lot is still there, still half-empty.  I return to my desk, and set about checking my e-mail.

—

Later that day, she calls again.  She has reread the chapters, and is glad to have done so, and glad that until she writes her own book, that someone is getting all this shit down.  Thanks again, Sweetie, she says.  That’s it, really.  Just wanted to let you know I read them.

I am back at the window, looking outside again.  We say we love each other; she calls me Sweetie again as she says good-bye.  I turn around; there is work to be done.

Miss Jackson and the Plastic Vagina

Miss Jackson and the Plastic Vagina

I.
There were waivers passed around in early
spring, in anticipation of the last
chapter in our sexual educat-
-ion, that first year of high school, in a brick,
renovated building deemed “not enough,
only up to date but not state of the
art,” by my father, when baggy pants and
hockey jerseys were still very much in
vogue, and braces plagued the adolescent
mouths of a grand number of us.

II.
Both my
responsible parents dutifully
signed it, and I was ignorant to the
fact that it was, in fact, a parental
right to refuse.  Upon that discove-
-ry, I remember thinking about the
outrage with which I would have greeted the
news that my mother and father were to
deprive me of the chance to hear about
breasts and intercourse, and all these other
things which were to fill my sordid,
acne-ridden head.

III.
Ms. Jackson, about
my mother’s age, greeted us all (minus
one, whose parents exercised their rights), and
set the new ground rules for engaging the
materials covered in the next few
chapters in our textbook (and here I have
to believe that she knew we read ahead).

IV.
The reading, however, was not memor-
-able, not satisfying my puerile
need for visuals.  Although, there was an
afternoon in which we suffocated
a banana with premium latex
condoms (I thought the packaging looked a
bit goofy), all of us taking our turns
after Ms. Jackson demonstrated the
proper technique (“Get the air bubbles out,”
she said, rolling it down towards the stem, a
reminder that I would receive a year
and a half later in the bed of some-
-one else after school, before I went to
work at the pharmacy), before we ran
to the bathroom, giggling, to wash the
smell of spermicide off.

V.
No one could have
foreseen the complications involved when
out of her bag, Ms. Jackson produced the
plastic vagina.  Gender mattered not
as she placed the beige body part on the
beige desktop:  we were all in a state of
utter disbelief, with an esteemed class-
-mate Nate emitting a hushed “Holy shit.”
Class proceeded, but our fresh teenage eyes
seldom diverged from the unexpected
guest.

VI.
As Ms. Jackson began detailing
the names of all the various regions
contained within this as yet unexplored
region of the female sex (both in the
classroom and the field), her fingers ventured
inside, I suppose as a way to catch
our attention and demonstrate its depth.
It seems, though, that this action, smacked not of
prudence, as when she attempted to ex-
-tract her hand from someone’s replica,
she found herself unable.

VII.
As students,
this was fast becoming a bit too much
for one period’s worth of awkward dis-
-comfort; true, some did laugh, but most of us
stared without offensive intent, simply
coming to terms with the fact that our ninth
grade health teacher had gotten her hand lodged
uncomfortably, unintentionally,
and apparently quite securely in-
-side a plastic vagina about which
we had absolutely no forewarning,
and trying to retrace how exactly
we got here, and what we’d be doing if
our parents had never signed that waiver.

VIII.
Too young to analyze what this situ-
-ation meant for the long term student-and-
-teacher dynamics of authority
and power, we silently complied as
she dismissed the class, waiting until we
were at the other end of the hall to
begin our laughter, that slow, rising song
of puberty-plagued guffaws, done before
the ringing of the sixth period bell.