AN INDELIBLE MEMORY
Parked on the Dyer Island Bridge for a moment, I recalled the misery of an afternoon half a century earlier, in 1959, and that I was parked then in precisely the same spot I found myself on this day, sixty-three years later. I turned off the ignition and opened one of several beers I keep on hand to nourish those increasingly frequent moments when I find that melancholy has sensed an opening.
Smitten, I tried to comprehend that sixty years had gone by. I couldn’t, I still can’t. How can the passage of that much time go un-noticed? I’ve seen other lives run their course and expire but have never thought seriously mine would be one of them. It’s always been difficult for me to think about the past, not just unhappy times but the past in any sense. Past implies gone and I simply cannot think of any part of my life as thus, as gone, even as memories fade, undeniably, away. I simply cannot reconcile myself to aging, and death is, well, it’s simply beyond me even while evidence to the contrary accumulates.
On that distant September afternoon, in 1959, I languished in the same spot consumed by the sweet anguish that is the determined companion of adolescence.
It was the day after Labor Day and Karen, a summer girl, and the first serious object of my affections, had just left her July/August lodgings here on Vinalhaven and returned home to Massachusetts to resume high school. Before leaving she suggested we see others during the coming school year, an exercise she said would illuminate and freshen our relationship, give it context, and make it easier to assess our feelings when she returned the next summer. She often employed such transcendent intellect and while I often didn’t understand, I did, in this instance, have a vague sense that it was not the affectionate and promissory parting I’d hoped for. Rather, I was consumed by the image of better-looking guys back in Massachusetts, smooth-talkers, guys who could dance without tripping or falling down or stepping on her and who could make out without inflicting injury. Despondent, I sat then in my Dad’s 56 Chevy Apache pickup, alone and miserable.
On this day, unable to get my mind wrapped around that much time being simply gone, I retreated again to the present. I looked down at my arm where, she and I having lasted longer than once seemed likely, I’d gone into downtown Milwaukee after completing boot camp and ill-advisedly had her name tattooed on my right wrist—ill-advised for several reasons. I was cited for example, when I returned to base with my arm bandaged, for destruction of government property and had to start boot camp again from the beginning. Ill-advised too because, while her name wafting on a banner held aloft by an eagle is a lovely tribute to that early romance, it’s not an enhancement now, fifty years later, when as I extend my arm across the dinner table to my sweetheart to express some affection, my sleeve slides up just enough to expose the eagle waving another woman’s name at her.
Ill-advised too because, when I came home on leave, picked her up, drove to a secluded spot to unveil my timeless expression of devotion, anticipating a rapturous and worshipful response, she told me that was the dumbest thing I might have done, got out of the truck, walked away and out of my life.