0413blog
Everything is Now
The past is never gone but always indelibly tucked away in the closeted background of your mind and sometimes in the foreground, shaping your world in ways that you want and sometimes ways you don’t want but always there, the good and the bad.
Like the moment of my 48-year-old father’s death from a stroke more than six decades ago and my mother’s hysterical, haunting cries that “We have no daddy anymore” and my 10-year-old, unsophisticated mind and slowly shattering heart trying to understand but failing miserably to get anywhere near grasping the mysterious concept of the finality of death and being entirely puzzled about where my father had gone while carrying the moment like a 100-pound weight on my back, informing my life for the rest of my days.
Or the regret of one fall day in 1968 when I broke up with Margaret, my first love, and told her I had to spread my wings and she threw her stuffed panda at me down the dormitory stairs of Drew University while she mixed screams and sobs and I skulked away like some lizard in a light drizzle, secretly excited about a new world and later how I begged her to take me back after I had suffered a drug induced episode of paranoia and Margaret slammed the phone down so hard that I felt its impact in Connecticut. I can still smell her perfume and see her Playboy centerfold body and feel the guilt and harm I had caused.
I sabotaged two friendships for purely selfish reasons. It was Bill’s wedding in Hudson County and I didn’t want to drive the 45 minutes in the rain so I just didn’t show, believing I probably wouldn’t be missed anyway. But I was missed as it was not a big wedding and Bill never spoke with me again and I never had the chance to apologize and apologies are empty and worthless anyway. I realized altogether too late the value of our friendship that would never be repaired.
My longtime friendship with Bob also came to a screeching halt when I attended the wedding of his son and went about criticizing the trappings that I considered pompous and phony, from the ice sculpture to the valet at the expensive country club in Alpine. I didn’t consider that I was insulting my friend on one of the most important days of his life and that I had no right to judge but I was oblivious and so self-important that I just had to express my condescending concerns. The price was that our friendship sank like the Titanic or rather that I had sunk our friendship and I still live with that disappointment and sadness and guilt and I miss my friend.
I recall the smells, the sounds, the emotions as if they were all yesterday. They have shaped my world and too often I was caught up in my own maelstrom to see the obvious effects of my actions. But just like I have my father’s death tattooed into my soul, I also can smell his unshaven face as I laid my head on his shoulder and felt the cotton of his white T-shirt or listened to his frequent and loud burps. And Margaret will always remind me of the first time we met and we danced through the night at a dance at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the next I knew was I was receiving scented letters at my Connecticut dormitory room. And Bill and I had such fun laughing at Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live or playing endless ping pong in the living room of the Passaic apartment we shared. Or the phone conversations with Bob where neither of us spoke for minutes at a time, only to interrupt the silence with an inane comment or the time we both bought motorcycles and within a week, he had gotten rid of his while I stayed with mine with great joy or the time we along with our spouses traveled to an upstate wooded area to go skinny dipping and where you better pay a fee to the caretaker or you would return to your car and find the air was let out of your car’s tires.
Sweet memories are no less powerful like the moment when I approached the incubator in the special care nursery and saw my tiny son, who was born three months early and weighed 2 pounds 4 ounces, connected to a spider web of wires and tubes that kept him alive and as I stuck my finger in the hole in the incubator and my son’s miniscule fingers instinctively wrapped around my finger and I can still feel his warmth and smell his smell of his unstoppable urge to live.
The bittersweet memories linger in my heart and I can effortlessly bring them back to life, smiling at the happy moments and deeply regretting the times I was blinded by my own selfishness and knowing that all of these moments describe me and make me who I am, for better or worse.