Category: being cancer

Today is Sunday, August 7, 2011.

Would have been 325 months.
I’ve got to stop.
I was listening to this song: “Life As We Know It” by Carolyn Dawn Johnson.
Its one of those sappy sentimental new country ditties that doesn’t have much redeeming value, except it captured a moment or a few moments in our life together, Anita’s and mine, like laying there together in bed in the comfortable quiet pretending to read our books meanwhile playing footsie under the covers the whole time, or later in the morning, rolling around, laughing, with the sunlight crawling across the wall. “Never been so happy, so content.” I despair that I will ever be so again. I know she won’t. And I’m asking myself why.
I know it will never be the same for me either, never unqualified, never pure, never whole, never without some tinge of guilt for leaving her and a part of myself behind, no matter whatever happens. And that’s a very powerful experience — its more than an emotion or a thought or a feeling. It’s the kind of thing that changes you. And then you’re someone else, and that person you were is gone, just like the love you used to share, and the person you shared it with.
Maybe I’m a little bit more easily moved at the moment, but anyway, I was took myself to make a list of songs that moved me the first time I heard them, like this one. And recall the times and the places and the reasons they moved me in the way they did. And I came up with a few surprises.
“I Cant Make You Love Me” by Bonnie Raitt.
It was just one of those moments, although with a slightly different spin, as Anita and I were laying together in the Austin Hyatt Regency in 1984 just as we were anticipating moving down to Austin.  And though we had many great times together, this wasn’t one of those.  Let’s just say she wasn’t too happy about it.  I was just trying provide as best I could. The details don’t matter I guess, but I remember laying there in bed with her, feeling somewhat distant from one another, and this song came on the radio, and it touched a nerve. She was sleeping right there next to me, literally in my arms, and I looked down at her, and I felt terribly alone.
“One Step Up” by Bruce Springsteen.
Kind of a similar situation in a way. In 1996 I took an assignment in the Seattle area for about a year. I got to go home for a long weekend every couple of weeks, and I was able to manage bringing Anita and the kids up for a good part of the summer. Julia and even my mom joined us for part of the time. It was pretty cool. I really enjoyed it mostly. But the early spring was harsh. Long periods without the sun just wore me down, working and basically living alone. I imagined what it would be like to be single. I came to the conclusion it would be horrible. But Anita and I were having difficulties then too. Not serious in the scheme of things, and not anything that even rose to the surface when we were together. I now know she was sick, and exhibiting signs of an out-of-whack thryoid, that’s the only way I can describe it, because it wasn’t completely non-functional, it was just going haywire. And you couldn’t predict how she would be. She was cool a lot of the time, and the joyful, sprited, jolly soul I loved. But some of the time, she was kind of harsh, at least the way I remember it, and I was lonely once again, but she wasn’t feeling me. And that seemed so strange, because she was the emotional one, she was the “feeler” yet here I was, feelings all over the place, and no one picking up on the other side. This song is about a breakup, but I was kind of going through one in my mind, in some kind of alternate universe.
“Is This America?” by Pat Metheny
After she was gone, I would spend many nights trying to shake off these feelings. Not being haunted so much, as haunting myself, torturing myself with the memories, the good times, and bad, of everything I had done for her, so much so that I forgot what part of my life was really mine, and what part was me becoming the man she needed. That’s why I said she was my compass. As long as I focused on her needs, and to the extent I made her happy, then I knew that I was on the right track. Then she was gone, and I lost my driving wheel. I was careening all over the decks. This song is about New Orleans after Katrina. And that’s a pretty good image of my interior world when I first heard this, I guess in August of 2011.
“Hard Times in Babylon” by Eliza Gylkison
This is kind of an oldie, and didn’t move me the first time I heard it, but one time it crossed my ears when I was in this vulnerable state. Now in the near rear view, it feels like I was on fire then. I can imagine people being capable of the most radical things when they’re in a state like that: “in the hour of the wolf, just before the dawn.” Burning down the house, shredding the documents, all kinds of terrible, irreversible things. That’s why I purposely put myself in a kind of suspended animation. “Nothing you can’t undo for a year. And baby steps after that” is what I told myself. I didn’t trust my own judgment. This song is about a suicide, I think. And so is not really applicable. But a few lyrics in there, “an incident so greivous. twenty years ago who’d have thought this would be the way that you’d leave us?” Just knocked me down. I don’t know why.

Today is the seventh of June. After twenty seven years, Anita and I still celebrated the monthly anniversary of our wedding. For all you folks who were there, here’s to you!
Its a tradition that goes back to the very beginning. Say what you want about us Catholics, we know how to do marriage. One of the things they made us do was go to a couple of sessions of what is called “Pre-Cana.” Basically it is kind of like a marriage how-to class. The name comes from the wedding feast at Cana, where as I like to point out, Jesus’ first miracle involved getting the party going, producing wine at the nagging of his mother.
We got lucky, I guess, and the couple who taught our class kind of had it together. And one of the things they suggested just stuck with us: for the first year of your marriage, huddle up on your monthly anniversary and take a check up. The guy said, “Think of it like a performance review at work.” That’s exactly what the way he put it. Ask questions like “how are we doing?” “what’s bugging you?” “what’s right, what’s wrong?” and don’t overlook the opportunity to compliment one another. Then right on cue his wife said, “great job in the sack last night, honey!”
Of course, that got a laugh, but it really turned out to be a great thing. I wish I could contact that couple, and let them know that we were still thinking of them, so many years later. So we did that, forgetting as often as not, but when we remembered, it was date night for sure, at least until the kids came, and then that’s where Friday date night originated — its just so much easier to get a sitter on Friday.
So when we remembered, the seventh of any month was a day to mark. Seven’s a good number. I recommend it. Often in latter years we’d forget, but sometimes we’d try to score points by being the one to remember, first thing in the morning or at some point during the day, and send the other one a text or whatever. It was a little goofy, I admit, but it was nice. And you know, having that special time, that opportunity to say something that maybe you didn’t know how to bring up, at first it was a real safety valve, then it became an opportunity for improvement for both of us, then we really tuned and tweaked the thing, and finally it became a comforting habit. You’d be surprised how we used it, and it worked.
But the 11:11 thing just came out of nowhere. Somewhere here in my journals, way back, like ten years or more, I have the comment that I can’t tell you how often I look up, and there’s a digital clock reading exactly 11:11, sometimes morning, sometimes night, sometimes the clock is just wrong. It happened so often that it just seemed kind of weird. So I mentioned it to Anita, and she started noticing it too. Then it became a wishing opportunity. I can’t tell you how or why, it just did. So we would make a pinky-wish whenever we noticed it. Of course, lately it was always the same wish. She never told me hers. Guess I’ll never know it now.
She even did it with her kids, for that one month she was teaching at Ace Academy. Ms. Lowe’s Leopards. First graders. She was so jazzed to get that job. And now this.
But anyway, she would come home and tell me how she taught them all to make pinky-wishes whenever they noticed that it was 11:11.

Turns out, when she passed away, it was the 11th of April, 2011. Guess what time it was.

Today would have been Anita’s 54th birthday.
Its hard to have to deal with this so soon after her death, but really its no more horrible than any other day.
The weather is ghastly, work is fucked up, but none of it touches me because I’m already in a place so bad the rest of it is “in the noise.” That’s an expression from physics I guess, meaning something can’t be detected because its characteristic signal is insignificant compared to the background radiation.
I’ve really got nothing.
I went to work like normal, and everything seems automatic and slightly distant.
But after work I decided to take the girls out to dinner to celebrate their mom’s birthday, just as we know she would have wanted us to.
We had a little family tradition of at least feasting the birthday boy or girl with the dinner or restaurant of their choice. You might say the tradition has its origins in the days when we were kids, my mom used to let my brothers and me pick our favorite dinner on our birthdays. I used to pick spaghetti and meatballs. Its not about how difficult it was to make, that was just what I liked. And from time to time as grownups Anita and I would ask one another to make something, rather than opting to go out. My favorite of hers was Chicken Cordon Bleu.
I remember when she first tried that recipe. When we first started living together she couldn’t cook worth shit. I was a much better cooker than she was. She told me one time that was one of the things that attracted her to me — I grilled her some fresh trout and asparagus and stuff like that, and poured her a little wine. And she was like, “Oh. Nice!” Yep, that’s how it all got started.
That was way back in the day, when I marked the phases of my life by where I was living at that time. So that would have been my little apartment on Valley View. One day she dragged me out shopping at this weird little hole in the wall out in Addison called Tuesday Morning, because that was the only time it was open, like a couple of hours one weekday morning every three months or so, you found out by word of mouth, and if you knew about it, you could go in and grab all this overstocked crap. Everything was like 75% off, and then some. Just the kind of place Anita would have loved, and as for me, well, it was against my nature, but when you love someone… oh, who am I kidding? I hated it and complained the whole time even then. But even complaining and quarreling with Anita was fun, somehow. One good thing came of it though, we found this decent cookbook, complete with pictures and step by step instructions, for the complete idiot. We put it to the test: “what does par boil mean?” Success! This is the book for us.
And in that book we had many adventures in dining. Eventually, Anita became quite accomplished, but I always told her that I taught her how to cook. She was like “What?” And I said, I bought her that book, and so everything she learned in there, she got from me. And she’d laugh and kiss me. I really miss that laugh, especially from back when we were young and love was fresh. That’s a real thing there.
In that book somewhere there was this recipe for Chicken Cordon Bleu, and it was a beaut. Anita eventually mastered it and it became her signature dish.
So Monica, Liz and I popped the cork on that champagne bottle, and went out to celebrate their mother’s spirit on the anniversary of her birth.
Anita and I had a more or less standing date Friday nights and in our latter years we settled down to a pretty regular routine. You might think it was boring, but you would be wrong. When the world is flinging all kinds of shit at you, retreating into the routine and familiar can be comforting and reassuring.
We would go out for dinner and a movie, talk about everything under the sun, laugh and make out in the theater like kids, and come home for a romantic evening in our little treehouse love shack.
Later on as we got older, and with all the entertainment choices at home it grew more and more difficult to justify the bother and expense of a movie out. Plus we were tired as shit come Friday night, so we’d just do dinner and watch a movie at home. We were pretty rigged out with the dvr, dvd rentals, or online. Too many choices, really. And then we had so much trouble agreeing on what to watch. She always wanted something focused on “feelings and relationships” and I wanted something thrilling with action and all that. Sound familiar?
One time we had some fun working through how someday we’d sit down and write the perfect combo — imagine a Tom Clancy action / spy thriller combined with a sexy, trashy romance. Anita loved historical, period elements like Jane Austen and the like. It is one of the toughest things for me to face the reality that dreams like that will never come true, not ever. It may never have come to pass anyway, but you always hold out that hope, that someday. But now we know for sure that that dream, the one where we worked together to create the perfect story will never be. Anita and I will never write that story — the perfect screenplay for the perfect date movie that fully satisfied both of us, and all other men and women just like us across the continent, among the couples out for looking for fun on their date night.
But maybe she’ll still be here with me, and guide me as my muse, and someday I will make it happen out of sheer force of will, something like what we imagined. If she does, I swear, I’ll give her top credit.
So, not only did Anita and I have a standing date, it was always the same one. The parameters changed slightly over the years. We’d go to our current favorite place, and we’d order the same thing every time. At first, it involved babysitters, and our place was a little hole in the wall called La Dolce Vita. It was run by this cute little old Italian couple, who grew their own herbs right there on the patio, and you could hear them chattering to one another in Italian in and around the kitchen. But one day we dropped by and they were gone, so we had to move on.
In recent years it was always sushi. I remember she hated even the idea of it at first. I said “c’mon, try it.” But originally she just ordered tempura, and watched me eat my tuna or whatever, and turn up her nose. Then I won her over, and ultimately, she was committed. She loved it as much as I did. That’s our life together in a nutshell. We won each other over, until we’re pretty much in agreement on everything that matters. Can I get a witness?
Actually, that reminds me of another of our first times together, dinner and a movie, and the morning after the first night I stayed over at her shitty little apartment down on Park Place. Man, that place was a dump! It was a shambles and her couch was a wreck, it was stained and I think it had fleas, and her mattress was laying on the floor, but wow! What a night! Never mind that, but in the morning I took her out to breakfast, and at one point became aware she was just sitting there watching me eat. I was ravenous, and ate too fast, like some kind of animal. And she just looked at me and asked herself, what is this? That’s what love is, people.
Lately, Anita and I had been frequenting a place called Nagoya, because it was pretty good, and a good value, and if you asked just the right way, they’d pop a bottle and pour you champagne by the glass.
But Monica, Liz and I went to another place, just because. We paused out in the parking lot to observe a really dramatic sunset sky as a very rare thunderstorm broke through the area. Very rare these days, as we’re in a pretty serious drought. We hung out in the parking lot, and watched the gathering clouds, menacing and dark, turn lavender and gold and salmon, and then a firerworks display of cloud to cloud lightning lit the sky and etched shadows on our retinas. Meanwhile, I regaled the kids with stories of how I met their mother, and other recollections and adventures from those days.
How our mutual friend Leo Dour journeyed down from New York to try one last time to win Debbie’s heart. Debbie was Anita’s roommate and best friend, and they were all buds back in college. Leo came to Dallas to woo Debbie, and he had to look me up, and why not, I was available, why not be his wing man, and make a foursome and we went out on a double date. That’s how we met.
And there’s lots more story to tell there, that will have to wait for another day.
But the girls and I had a fine time, and a proper celebration. And when we came home, Liz cranked up some jams, and we all turned on our computers. That’s the new mode, even when Anita was still with us: four people, four computers. Everybody doing their own thing. But it was kind of cozy in a way, like I imagine back in the day, but punctuated by the clicking of keyboards, or music, or the sounds of computer games or youtube or whatever.
For some reason I hadn’t opened up this one laptop we had laying around until just then, and when I did, there was a window open that told me Anita had been the last person to use it. She had finished one of her favorite games, and left the high score up like a hard won trophy. Word games and crosswords had become a compulsion for her lately, and this particular one was called “Text Twist.”
I stood there, as Rage Against the Machine blew out of my amp, covering me over with sound like an ocean wave, and I could not bring myself to close that stupid window. Finally I broke down in tears, a worthless piece of crap.
Then we huddled up a little bit, and I came to a new awareness that I was being kind of selfish. I knew my girls were dealing with their own grief, even as they’re concerned, and were trying to take care of me. They’re mature young women now, but I was still their father, their only parent, and they’re still looking to me to set an example. And all that overwhelmed me even more, and we all just sat there stewing, while I sobbed, out of tears, but still perfectly miserable.

I’m sitting in the Southwest Airlines terminal in Baltimore-Washington airport after a long week. What I’m doing here and why it was long and stressful don’t matter now. All that matters is that I’m sitting here, and its been a pretty successful week, and its a nice space, and the weather has been fine, but I’m kind of barely holding it together.
I remember many years ago, I traveled up here to interview with a professor at Johns Hopkins for their phd program in what was then called applied math. That particular program was focused on computational geometry, an area I was familiar with from my work at GSI. You’ve probably never heard of them, and they don’t exist anymore, assimilated in the long list of mergers and acquisitions across the landscape of American business over the last thirty years. Yes, I said thirty years, that’s how long ago it was.
I can recall another trip, not that much further back when I was about to graduate from UT, with Harris Corp., in of all places, Rochester N.Y. There was no way I was going to live there, though they did make me an offer. But I remember the nice hotel they put me up in, and imagining how in my career I would become an important man and an experienced traveler. That sort of happened, but its not like what I imagined. I also talked with DEC in Boston. Yet another company that doesn’t exist anymore. I remember wearing a hand me down suit that didn’t fit, and that they were all casual and working in overflow space that appeared to have been an old supermarket. I would have been happy to work there, if they’d have had me. But they were working on compilers, and other crap that really wasn’t in my area. I had a greater interest in graphics, and GSI had needs along those lines, and so it seemed more of a match.
So that’s where I went: Geophysical Services Inc., the parent company of Texas Instruments, believe it or not.
It was a different time, when I hooked up with them. They sent a recruiter to campus to hunt for “june brides” as they called us. Getting that job was like falling off a log. And I didn’t even bother looking farther once they made me an offer. And when I look back on it now, oh, hell, I knew then there were different interpretations you could put on it. But anyway, that’s how I came to be living in Dallas of all places. Kind of random and haphazard. Whatever. That was me all over.
Working at GSI and being in the oil industry during that time was a trip. But after just two years I got the bug to go on to graduate school. It took a while to make the preparations, take my GREs, and so on, and then I threw some applications around, figuring what the hell? I sent one to Harvard, which has a more modest computer science department than you might think, and some other places like that, including Johns Hopkins. They responded to some of my relevant interests and experience , and so I came up here to Baltimore for the interview. The campus was in a segment of downtown that in those days was kind of a hell hole. It looked like it might have been in the beginnings of a renewal, but it was ringed by pretty desperate ghettos. The interview with a prof, whose name I unfortunately forget, went pretty well. I do remember we got along. But I had basically no money, and I told him so, that I really wanted to be a part of their program, but I just couldn’t do it unless they gave me some financial help.
That night I called Anita from the hotel room, and I remember feeling at the time like she was a little needy and maybe even controlling. We were living together, we weren’t married yet, but she insisted I call her every night when I was away.
I was happy to hear her voice, but I was a little bothered at the guilt trip.
One time years later, I was in graduate school down in San Marcos. I was going to night school, and one time stayed late after class drinking with a buddy of mine. It got too late for the long drive home and I crashed at his place. I knew she would want me to check in, but I said fuck it she don’t own me. And I just didn’t do it.
The next day she railed over me how she thought I was dead and she was about to call the police.
And I thought it was kind of nice that someone cared about me that much, and that maybe it was one thing to forget, but another for me to willfully neglect her feelings and cause her pain.
You could say it was a training exercise and I caved, but you would be wrong. What happened was that I became more keenly aware of how much I loved her and that I didn’t want her to be unhappy.
So it was thoughts similar to these, though much more nascent that passed through my mind when Anita and I talked on the land line from my hotel room that night many years ago in Baltimore.
…
Ok, so the thought I had was that at first I was a little bit annoyed that Anita made me call her whenever I traveled, and there I was, dutifully checking in, though I knew Anita didn’t want me to leave Dallas, and we even briefly discussed how she could come with me or what we would do if I got in. Or what it would be like to be apart, since we both got so sad when I was gone even for just a few days. How was I going to make this happen? I thought to myself. But I was still kind of a kid myself, and I even remember that I wanted to watch this TV show that was on at the time, called ‘V’.
Not the superior Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, and not the remake of the series they made decades later, and not anything important either. It’s just the kind of thing you remember. This was some miniseries about aliens — I was always a sucker for science fiction on TV — but Anita kept going on and on, it seemed to me, and I was listening to her out of one ear, and watching the show with one eye, and not really getting much out of either.
But then over the course of the next few months, and through an unlikely series of events, I was eventually accepted to the program but was not able to go.
Anita had already been sick, and was beginning to get better. Just at that time she started looking around for a house. I’m not really sure, but I think the way that happened was this: we had this nice little apartment overlooking a greenbelt in Dallas in a place called Bridge on the Creek.
It was our first shack, a great spot, and we enjoyed it a lot. That was where we lived while Anita got her fateful radiation therapy. She lost her hair, not all of it, but a good swath down around the back of the neck. It was enough to shake you up. She also lost a lot of weight. And just like more recently, I even felt a little guilty about thinking, you know, she was looking pretty good. Some kind of diet. And so all that was going on. But then one day, we came home from work to discover we had been robbed.
They just took my musical equipment, and not anything else. Our electronics, Anita’s jewelry, other valuable stuff like that was out and visible. What they did take included a moog synth (the only one that had not actually been designed by Bob Moog), and a pair of Roland Cube amps. I suspect it was this dude who jammed with me and Larry and JB that one time, some loser friend of Larry’s I had never met before, and he seemed kind of strung out. I don’t know, whoever it was, they robbed us, but only took my musical equipment. Weird. I have to tell the rest of that story someday.
But after that Anita was never comfortable in the apartment and really wanted to move. I was fine, as I recall, but if she wanted to go and spend her time looking for some other place to live, whatever, so be it. Who knew she’d come back with a house?.
It was one in a long series of accommodations, acquiescences I made to her over the years, and I knew what was happening, but it all seemed to be happening in slow motion, like it wasn’t really happening to me. I was kind of like an addict. I knew it, but I kept on doing it, because I loved her so much and I wanted her to be happy. Loving someone is like a kind of surrender.
But for some reason, we took just that moment — between the time I had been accepted to Johns Hopkins, but without financial aid, and the time when I got the call that the fellow in line ahead of me declined and the grant they were going to award to him was now available for me — this was a period of about a month or so. This happened to be the time when we decided to buy this little house out in Garland.
Looking back, it was a super dumb move. That house was never worth shit. One time I went back and looked, and found out its not worth much more now than what we paid for it then, thirty years ago now. We had an FHA loan, one of the last as it turns out — but it was what is called a negative amortization loan.
Who in their right mind would do such a thing? To take out a loan that just goes backwards like that? And to do so just at that time? We were complete idiots. Both of us. But I was the bigger idiot, because it was my paycheck that was at the center of everything, and made it possible for us to do more and stupider things, and someone on the outside might say that she was just using me. Hell, you might just as easily say that I was using her too. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.
But that’s like seeing a beautiful flower sport up in your vegetable garden, and calling it a weed. And I won’t deny I had thoughts like these at the time, and people said things like this to me, and all I could say was “if it feels this good getting used, then you just keep on using me, until you use me up.”
We talked about it from time to time over the years, and she might spin the story a little differently. If you want her point of view, just go ask her. Oh, too late for that, I guess. Go read her journal, then. No luck there either, I’m afraid. Though I begged her many times, she never wrote one, so my version of this story is the only one there is any more, to the extent anyone cares, which is to say, not much. I guess that makes this perspective about as true as any other history.
What I’m saying is that I knew all of this at the time, as it was happening, and I didn’t care, because I loved her, and I wanted her to be happy. If a shitty little starter house out in the cotton fields of Garland Texas is what would make her happy, then that’s what we’d get her. I’m not ashamed, and I’m not making any excuses. This is just what happened.
But I thanked my lucky stars that we were able to get out of it — when I took that job down in Austin with Schlumberger. A mere nine months later. The main attraction was not the house itself, but the loan — we were able ot get someone to assume the loan. It was a non-qualifying assumable FHA loan. Another real dinosaur that doesn’t exist any more. It was a negative-am loan at 12%, something that in any sane world should be illegal. But they weren’t and furthermore there were boneheads out there dumb enough to take them.
So some ne’r do-wells who couldn’t qualify for a proper mortgage were eager to buy us out. I remember sitting in our little kitchen with the shark who found them for us. He was an older gent with a big gold nugget ring on his finger. He was some sort of associate of Larry Clodfelder, the recruiter who hooked me up with Schlumberger. Larry was a real character, a boozehound too. He made us some tall drinks over at his place to celebrate me taking that job — he loved me — and I remember him calling after us, as we went to leave — a little uncomfortable about his drinking — and him offering us a couple of “roadies” tall mixed drinks in plastic tumblers for the road. Who does a thing like that?
But as I focus on that period of time during which we bought that house. Was it a month? Or three? What was I thinking?
I feel now like a man waking up after a long period of unconsciousness — like a shipwreck survivor coming to on a desert island, thinking “what the…?”
But its not like I was really unconscious, I knew what I was doing the whole time, or rather I became aware shortly after this episode I’m writing about — what was going on, but I kept going anyway — it became a habit, then I became committed to it, and now that she’s gone, and I travel on business, I sit on my bed in the hotel room at night and think, “this is the time when I’d call Anita.”
And over the years, she changed. She was different. I mean she changed and then changed again, as I had.
At first, as I recall, she seemed a little clingy. She was always kind of childlike. That’s one of the many things I found attractive about her. Like her good friend Debbie wrote recently, she had a lot of “emotional energy.” From a guy’s point of view, she was the kind of person you just wanted to take care of and protect. I know I’m not the only one who felt that way about her.
She was open, trusting, naive perhaps. Many of the things I was not — or thought I was not — but especially after we left Dallas, and were basically alone in Austin, she was pretty attached to me, and didn’t like me to travel.
But the first set of changes came with the kids. She changed physically and emotionally. And I know its a regular pattern, they came to replace me as the center of her life. At first I was a little jealous of them, especially when Monica first came along. She was the whole universe to Anita. Monica’s birth was a watershed event. She represented hope for a future and something resembling a normal life. We had been advised we might have difficulty having children, and had had a miscarriage previously. That was hard. Like I said, Anita was very open and accessible, but she still had a private side, and we were as close to one another as two people can be. Deep down she had dark thoughts, and desperate days, and questions about where it all was going. I mean back there when we were going through all these life changes, which can be challenging enough under normal circumstances. But when you’ve had a life threatening experience with cancer, or some similar sort of issue, it just messes with your head. And then Monica came along, and we thought, “hey, you know, there might be a life ahead for us after all.” I was an immature young man, and like many others, I was unreasonably optimistic, or even cavalier about life, and looking back I was like, “duh.” But you know, for her it was different. Oh, its a beautiful, eternal cosmic dance. And anyone who thinks that women can live without men or vice versa, is like a baby splashing water, and calling it rain.
But then Anita started putting on weight and little by little her behavior was changing. She still hated seeing me leave. Years later, I was working for PSW, and I remember my boss Brian Baisley telling me the story of how he ran into Anita and the kids in the airport shortly after we had made a tearful goodbye, as I went on up to Seattle. And I remember I have a journal entry from around that time, when I was sitting in an airport just like I was today, watching the rain on the darkened window of the terminal, listening to “Angel of Montgomery” on the PA. And its hard leaving your little family. And later on over drinks, Brian said he envied me. He told me how he was divorced and his second wife pretty much just waved him off goodbye, and he said as many others have, “she really loves you.” And I knew it, and it made me proud, and it made me love her back all the more.
But then as time went on, Anita’s behavior started becoming more and more whacky, and someday I’ll have to go back to cite you chapter and verse on it, but I remember she was kind of fierce and angry all the time, and a little bull-headed and had a bit of a temper. And I remember the kids were still little but I could always talk with them almost as if they were young adults even then, and we would talk about it, after an argument, say, of which there were many, and I would ask them “is it me?” and they would say “no dad, mom was acting funny again” and this went on for some years before we figured out it was her thyroid. And it was my idea she have it checked, thank you very much, and it turned out to be cancer, and they took it out. Actually that was a stressful experience in itself — she had to ingest some radioactive crap and spend the night alone in a lead lined room — but that’s another whole story.
And it took a couple more years of bouncing around with the synthetic thyroid medication before they finally got her balanced more or less, and this was a long process, including the time I advised her to see a shrink, after a long series of silliness and nonsense. He listened to her story, and the way I understand it, his jaw dropped about halfway through. Remember like all these docs, he’s just a kid compared to us. So Anita begins to tell her story, and halfway through he jumps up and says “no wonder you have anxiety! You’d be crazy if you didn’t!” and hands her a paper bag full of pills right there on the spot. The way I imagine it, he took a handful himself before falling back in his chair, nearly fainting.
He put her on this drug called wellbutrin, which is an anti-anxiety medication, and it seemed to me that between the synthroid bouncing around and the wellbutrin, Anita was really much more stable, but a little of the fire was suppressed. She wasn’t as passionate as I remembered her being years before, for better or worse. Its hard to put your finger on it, exactly. Just a little less color, and more shades of grey, I guess.
I don’t know if it was just my imagination or what, but the change, though subtle, was definite and it just kind of took a little bit of her edge off. It’s hard to describe. She just kind of cooled off.
And sometimes I would call her when I was traveling and maybe she was tutoring or in the middle of something and I was laying there lonely in my hotel room, but she was sort of just distracted, and it felt like maybe just tolerating me, or something like that. Which I knew wasn’t really true. I knew she loved me, but that’s how it felt, and so it was true in a way, if you know what I mean.
So its been a long road from that hotel room in Baltimore in ’82 to the last few nights, also in Baltimore in ’11. And I don’t know what I feel, but part of it is a terrible sense of loss and emptiness. But the more I think about it, the more I realize its alright, and its like I’ve lived a whole life in that time, beginning, middle and end. And now I’m outside that life, taking its lessons with me into another, riding the crest of the wave of the eternal now, onward into the unknown future.

Today is January 1, 2011.
We had a fine Christmas with the kids around us, and we’re really feeling the love.
My pretty little wife is as cute and lovely as the day we met. We’re as much in love today as any two people ever were. Our love is the kind of love you read about, some poor people only get to dream about. But we’re living it, baby, every day!
We got some stuff going on in our lives that really ain’t all that good, but taking things one day at a time, in spite of everything, these days are still pretty sweet.
…
I find myself listening to Churchill more and more, maybe even a little obsessively.
I’m focused in on this period from 1940-41, when after the inglorious fall of France, and before Stalin switched sides, Britain stood alone in the world against Hitler. Through the fall and winter of 1940 the people of Great Britain withstood a punishing bombardment of their ports, airfields, factories and even populated centers, all the while lacking any means of retaliation. These days I sometimes think of ourselves as if we were Londoners under the blitz. Churchill said at the time that “the British people would withstand the merciless onslaught with grit and determination and in the sure knowledge that they would survive and ultimately prevail against the cruel menace.”
Later, after many dark days, but when the hour of victory finally seemed to be approaching he allowed himself to admit that “it would have been a rash man then who could put down in black and white exactly how we were going to do it.”
So without getting too philosophical or anything, when the road is dark and the times are hard, all we can do is focus our entire energies and concentration on the immediate task at hand, sometimes with little more than our own faith and courage to sustain us.
As they say, its always in God’s hands, and sometimes it just takes times like this to remind you.



Merry Christmas, and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to all!