Singing By the Wayside

December 27, 2008 | Laughing Knees | 1 Comment 

I’ve writ­ten quite a few songs and thought I’d get them out into the pub­lic ear. The record­ing is ter­ri­ble and my gui­tar play­ing re­ally needs a lot of work, but if any of you are in­ter­ested, please take a mo­ment to listen.

Evening Love

Fuji

Geese In Flight

Take Your Time

When You Love Someone

Words of Farewell

I Am Forty Eight

December 17, 2008 | Laughing Knees | 21 Comments 

A lit­tle less than a month ago I turned forty eight. That morn­ing I woke and lay in my bed as the dawn lit up my bed­room win­dow and thought about noth­ing, just let­ting my breath draw in and re­lease. I lay like that for a long time, un­til the town morn­ing bell, which al­ways sounded at 6:00, brought me back to this world and it was time to get up and head to work.

I hadn’t ex­pected a mem­o­rable day. I had to work, af­ter all, and most days at work left a lot to be de­sired in terms of get­ting through it with any sense of ac­com­plish­ment. But for some rea­son my birth­day seemed to shine this time, and by the time I got home later in the evening I couldn’t have asked for bet­ter time spent. All day stu­dents whom I hadn’t imag­ined thought twice about me out­side of class dropped by to talk and wish me happy birth­day, and two of them, who have started to be­come real friends, even asked me to join them for lunch and had a makeshift cel­e­bra­tion wait­ing for me. All the well-​​wishes and ca­sual greet­ings fol­lowed ex­actly the way I like in­ter­ac­tions be­tween peo­ple: sim­ple and unpretentious.

It’s been a har­row­ing few months since I last wrote here. Har­row­ing and won­der­ful, all in one. Back in Au­gust, af­ter the weeks of be­ing bedrid­den with an in­fected leg I met a woman on­line who changed my life. Nei­ther of us had ex­pected it. One mo­ment we were writ­ing a few emails back and forth, the next minute we met and couldn’t stop talk­ing with one an­other. It seemed every­thing clicked… our abil­ity to open up to one an­other, our in­ter­ests, our at­trac­tion as a man and a woman, our goals, even the way we laughed and got an­gry at one an­other… it all worked as if we were made for each other.

But like all these dreams, re­al­ity held its end of the bar­gain and we had to take a hard look at whether or not we re­ally could make this work. She has a child and be­fore any­thing else that is what we, es­pe­cially she, had to con­sider. On top of that we lived a con­sid­er­able dis­tance apart and it wasn’t easy to both pay for and make the time for the jour­ney as of­ten as we wanted. More and more I felt that if we wanted the re­la­tion­ship to work then I had to take the plunge and head out to live near where she did, so we had enough time with one an­other, but also to make it pos­si­ble to get to know her daughter.

Things didn’t work out that way, at least not yet. She wants time to think it over now and to de­cide whether to stay with me or not. We haven’t seen each other for more than a month now and for the past two weeks she asked me not to con­tact her. The wait­ing is ab­solute agony. While I per­fectly un­der­stand why she needs to do that, the thought that the only woman in my life whom I, now 48, have ever been ab­solutely sure of might now slip out of my grasp just when I found her, hurts more than I can put into words. I have enough ex­pe­ri­ence in life to know that there is noth­ing I can do but wait and hope, but I won­der what my life will be like af­ter­wards if she leaves. I have never met a woman who made me feel this way be­fore… so much so that for the first time I re­al­ize how much I’ve needed and wanted a fam­ily, even if the child is not my own, and, to my sur­prise, I’m not scared at all about deal­ing with the ob­sta­cles of liv­ing with a child. I even wel­come the prospect of get­ting to know her daugh­ter, with all the re­ac­tions the daugh­ter will have… so the chance of my meet­ing an­other per­son like this is quite slim. And the truth is I just don’t want any­one else. I can’t imag­ine any­one else.

All my life un­til now my life has been about me. Even when I got mar­ried, it was mainly about me. I’ve al­ways fo­cused on what I wanted and put my money and time into pur­suits that mainly in­ter­ested me and of­ten didn’t take into ac­count what my part­ner needed or wanted. Though I’ve al­ways been aware of and tried hard to work on my part­ners’ feel­ings, of­ten I stopped short and hurt the peo­ple who were clos­est to me. It was only re­cently as I was forced to take a good, hard look at who I am and what I wanted, needed, and had to do for my and my partner’s fu­ture, that I sud­denly came face-​​to-​​face with my own self­ish­ness. It was like a big, scary ogre just sit­ting there wait­ing to ruin every­thing. And I re­al­ized that all my life I had never re­ally held some­thing that was more im­por­tant to me than I was my­self, that I would un­re­servedly give my life for. Now I have. And I’m shak­ing with rue and hu­mil­ity. How small I am. And how much a fool I have been.

Last week my wife and I made the fi­nal de­ci­sion to get di­vorced. It’s been a very long time com­ing, es­pe­cially with these last two years liv­ing apart, still not one hun­dred per­cent sure. We both still love each other very much and per­haps that is part of what has made it so dif­fi­cult to face. Nei­ther of us wants to hurt the other or see the other hurt. Prob­a­bly if we hated one an­other break­ing up would be so much eas­ier. We don’t hate each other, though, and never could. But for so long now we have co­ex­isted with no real com­mu­ni­ca­tion and no sense of be­ing a man and woman to­gether and no plans or goals what­so­ever, the breakup was in­evitable. And prob­a­bly bet­ter for both of us. When we sat talk­ing to­gether last week­end we both openly hoped the other would find a part­ner so that nei­ther of us would end up alone. I guess this is a dif­fer­ent kind of love, one that let’s one an­other go with­out jeal­ously guard­ing the bond.

Reach­ing forty eight has opened my eyes to the pas­sage of time. And lit­tle of it there is left. I re­al­ized on the morn­ing of my birth­day that there weren’t many breaths like that to go and that each one of them was pre­cious from now on. Maybe that is why the whole birth­day was so peace­ful and full of joy, and for those mo­ments I was very aware of how spe­cial every sin­gle de­tail of be­ing alive was, that noth­ing was wasted or in­signif­i­cant. It didn’t re­ally mat­ter if I was stand­ing on top of a moun­tain or ly­ing in a bed some­where, all of the dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions of liv­ing held a com­plete man­dala of time all its own, and it was per­haps my re­spon­si­bil­ity to rec­og­nize the pre­cious­ness in what­ever sit­u­a­tion I found my­self in. As the younger years fall away be­hind me surely there must be value in what I have learned so far? Per­haps that be­ing alive, lov­ing some­one, and be­ing loved, are all that re­ally matter.

I can wait. Wait for her, wait for a daughter’s trust to flower, wait through the night for the dawn to come, wait for what­ever I thought I knew about my­self. Even wait for my wife to gather up the courage to say good bye. It no longer mat­ters what I think or what I want things to be, what mat­ters is that the ones I love are safe, that I can see why the dawn is so beau­ti­ful, and that, when all is done, I can ad­mit that I re­ally didn’t mat­ter at all, that none of it was ever about me.