Burning the Misplaced Pieces of the Past

Not long after Mark and I were engaged, I began to think about our love story, the one we would tell our children. We would share details that make all epic stories come to life: how we met as singing waiters our junior year of college, and how he compelled me to take his drink orders because it was against his moral code - a code I challenged him to find a cogent and systematic thought process to use for his defense. We would also share how he voluntarily bused my tables prior to driving me back to my dorm each weekend night in his white Honda Civic and how we carried take-home containers of chocolate truffe mousse to my room to share. We would even - maybe - confess how he stayed right up to (and even past some nights) the dormitory's visitation hours.

From courtship through engagement, the story of our early romance would convey to our yet unconceived children how our love surpassed all other stories of romance that might have been written for each of us had we not dared to take a chance on dating a type of person we never expected to meet.

I also wanted to safeguard our story from mythology - illusions about our romance or romances we had abandoned along with the romancers who had abandoned us. I wanted our children to know only of our misgivings and mistakes. Our love had not bloomed without rainy days. We had even endured a storm only weeks prior to our engagement. But bloom, it did, even surviving harsh seasons. The hardiest perennials do. Our children would need to know that.

They would need to know that the first bloom appeared about 29 years ago, back when I worried about notes, other love letters written by other suitors, being found by future children. Those scraps of paper outlined stories that should never be told, I believed. Not if Mark and I were to commit ourselves only to each other. We were collaborators of an epic saga, a saga that would birth beautiful children who would know only of the love that bore them.

Therefore, the other love notes had to be burned. No misplaced pieces of our separate pasts should supplant our storyline.

Our tale of love had begun to weave its way from the Chalet Room at Carver's Restaurant, and it deserved a clear path to the lively retirement abode we would choose for our most golden and final years. Our children should never doubt the wisdom we had exercised in our early 20s when we chose to travel a complex but unified path together. "Wisdom" and "early 20s." Could there be such a combination? If so, we needed to affirm it. Protect it. We needed to burn the notes.

Still, what if the relationship that our children would see in the future didn't live as vividly for them as any colorful tales they might freely concoct? Perhaps not having other notes would not matter. Even if evidence did not exist, vividly imagined details could be invented - by them, if not us. What if some mythological storyline - crafted even without the aid of rejected love notes - could unseat our real life story anyway?

Until our children could write the toughest chapters of their own hearts' tales, they could comprehend love. Not really. 

Love - sustaining love - is nurtured through careers and children and broken dreams and dream vacations and experimental vocations and heartaches and midlife crises and ordinary days of non-crises and retirement and, well, things I cannot know of either - not yet anyway. My great love story is far from over, and while I have witnessed other great loves, their endings have not been well documented - not as well as their beginnings. Perhaps endings are so intensely personal, so poignant and full, they cannot be wholly shared. Or maybe the greatest love stories have no endings because they do not end. What a merciful thought.

That is why those other notes - puzzle pieces of unseasoned passion - had to be burned; they were burned, turned into ash that matched the relationships that bore them. Our children cannot resurrect them. Neither can we.

Mark destroyed his on a day and in a manner of his choosing before I had a chance to add mine to his pile. Fitting perhaps, for we had collected them separately; separately they turned into ash.  I am grateful their embers flamed the fire that has warmed us for nearly three decades. Those relationships mattered too.

Today I took out the collection of love letters that survived those years - Mark's cards and hand-written pages to me during our courtship. I read one. Then one more. Still another. I read in search of me and the man I chose to marry. Can we really be found in the words of those love epistles? They are now as mysterious to me as they will be to our children one day when they find them. Hidden in plain sight.

I don't need to read them to recall who I married. According to those love letters, that man does not exist anymore anyway.

Anytime I need to recall the story of my life's great love, I will simply walk into my kitchen at dinner time. He will be standing near the stove, either cooking the evening meal for our family or insisting on helping me do the same. And when our family meal has ended, he'll help me bus our table - plates and glasses into the dishwater, pots and pans washed in the sink. There will be no need for him to drive me home. We will already be there. Our sons have seen that part of our story many times. That might be all they really need to know.    

_______________________

Note: The poem that sparked my thinking is "His Elderly Father as a Young Man" by Leo Dangel. I would post it here for you to enjoy as well but do want to commit copyright infringement. I encourage you to find it in Home from the Field, © Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997.

She's Making It Through the Rain

I often say that working as a singing waiter was the best job I've ever had. In fact, if you are a regular follower of the blog, you have even watched me say it when I vlogged with two of my former co-workers (e.g., Paul and Pam).

They, of course, were my husband Mark's former co-workers, too. Clearly, the best part of my job at Carvers Restaurant was meeting him: my soul mate. But a close second was the opportunity to regularly stand around a grand piano and sing my heart out during two to three dinners shows each week (five to seven during the holidays) plus a weekly Saturday morning rehearsal. Great song selections, talented coworkers, charming atmosphere, delicious food. Music wove this enchanted environment together in a way that continues to evoke peace, belonging and joy, eons after we lived those moments in real time.

This week I've picked up a vibe from Pam's Facebook updates. It's a vibe I recognize: Life isn't comfortable right now. The details of what she is dealing with day to day don't match the feelings associated with life as it should be. Unfortunately, that's the way it is when you live year after year with cancer and cancer treatments (and she's doing it as a single mother of a preteen). It's also the way it is when your life has been shaped by the needs of an adult child with disabilities for close to 20 years, and you realize those years will extend either the duration of your life - or his.

When you are living with chronic health issues, the demands of daily life regularly override how you want to feel. You have to fight to keep yourself above the threshold of what you personally find tolerable. Some days you want to be alone with your struggle. Other days you want people to recognize that you need support. Rare is the day you ask for the support you need. You simply don't want to become another person's tidal wave.

In Involuntary Joy, I attempt to describe the sensations that shape this type of existence using water. I acknowledge times I have felt overwhelmed - swallowed by the latest wave created by a personal financial storm, a poor health storm, a dysfunctional relationship storm, or an employment storm. Sometimes a perfect storm of emotions - created by swirls from each crises - threaten to drag me down.

As I describe in the book, I have learned to employ nostalgia therapy when I recognize that I am standing in torrents of rain. At those times, I whisk myself back to when life felt magical and pregnant with possibilities that I had yet to ponder. For me - and for Mark as well - that time, that place, is Carvers.

Here's what I shared in Involuntary Joy:

Carvers Restaurant had been our Camelot, the magical location of our first meeting and subsequent courtship...No matter how many dined in the restaurant's Chalet Room those glorious evenings, I could always count on one pair of eyes to lock on mine across a finely laden sea of glassware and candlelight...At Carver's I had never seen pain in Mark's eyes. But sitting in the exam room room where we learned of our miscarriage, I could see his pain - feel it even. Had it been possible, I'd have transported us back to the place where our dreams had essentially begun-back to a time when he was the tenor with a huge smile, and I was the flirtatious alto who always managed to be near him ...

I sense that Pam is experiencing a flood that feels overwhelming - things caused by drenching emotional rain that shows no sign of stopping. But those like Pam (and Mark and me) who have stood in such a rain know that it eventually does stop, even if we can't anticipate when or how.

We also know that when it stops, we will find ourselves standing with our shoulders back again, with smiles feeling easy again, and words coming out softer and measured again. And, we won't need to cry tears of release just to breathe deeply anymore.

Essentially, we will find that we have made it through the rain, and - as Barry Manilow helped us recognize - we may even feel respected by the others who have been rained on too and have also made it through.

This is for you, dear Pam. I respect you. I believe in you. I am with you. I hope this bit of nostalgia therapy will help you ride out this storm.

Love, Joy