Pura Vida: Horseback riding, La Fortuna Waterfall

We met Alberto the day after an accident at his stables.  A stallion, angry at Alberto for inviting another stallion to the ranch, knocked the horseman to the ground, pinned him down, and bit his upper arm.  Shirtless, broad-featured, barrel-chested, fresh bandage glaring white against his tanned skin, Alberto looked tough as rock.  He walked with obvious pain.  Not only did the run-in with the stallion injure his back, he also suffered from a chronic ailment.  With my limited Spanish (as in, limited to understanding at about a middle-school level and speaking hardly any) I couldn't tell if it was sciatica, chronic back pain, or an old leg injury.  Riding horseback was one thing, but how was our guide supposed to make it down 492 steps to La Fortuna Waterfall, let alone back up?

"You look at me and you think, 'That's crazy, how could he do that?'" Alberto said.  "If I worked in an office, it would be crazy.  My job, this is just part of what you do."

Pura Vida: Zip Lines, La Fortuna, and Pizza Delivery

After breakfast at the Treehouse Hotel, our first foray was to Ecoglide for a zip line tour of the base of the Arenal volcano.  I lost track of how many platforms they had, but thankfully Becky took a picture:

This.  This many platforms.

June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012

A recent survey declared Goodnight Moon the best picture book of all time, but for me it begins and ends with The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  I loved that book so much, almost as much as I loved Snowy Day.  It takes a lot of effort to admit that Where the Wild Things Are comes in third, because Maurice Sendak's death is clouding my judgment.  But can you really compare degrees of love?  People don't make you pick a favorite child, so I can't really pick a favorite childhood memory.

It doesn't take a degree in children's literature to declare Wild Things the best of the three.  It's a paean to imagination, it understands children in a way the others don't, and it's a perfect example of using illustration to represent emotion in a picture book.  Sendak was one of the greatest (and easily the most reluctant) children's author / illustrators ever, and the landscape of children's bookselling that he helped create has muted colors over his passing.

As loyal Sweet Readers know, Maurice Sendak has a special place in our hearts that he has enjoyed for some time.  Apart from the homage and the semi-serious pleas in those posts, Becky and I have been working behind the scenes for some time to make a Max tattoo drawn by Sendak himself a reality on Becky's famous arm.  Becky and I work in the book business at an indie with a lot of clout.  We don't know people, but we know people who know the right people, and we wanted to make it happen.

A couple of months back, we got our answer; Sendak said he "couldn't commit to something like that at this time."  I didn't blog about that because we never gave up hope.  Now, well.

I'm not trying to make this about me.  The loss to books is greater but the loss of the dream hits closer to home.  Everyone I've spoken with has their own memory of his work, and their own sorrow at his death.  This is just mine.  We may not have a tattoo to remember him by, but at least we have his work.

On Tuesday night, Becky and I put Dylan to bed with In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and Where the Wild Things Are; all three read just fine.  Mighty fine, in fact.  Dylan did say he was "too sad" to fall asleep, but he was probably just trying to delay his bedtime.  Or sympathizing with his sad sack parents.

Eventually we'll enjoy his work without the taint of sadness.  In the meantime...

The Book World Just Got a Lot Less Interesting

George Whitman with daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman

If you didn't recognize it, the background photograph of SwF&F is a picture Becky took when she visited Shakespeare and Company in Paris.  Unfortunately, owner George Whitman died yesterday. 

Read his obiturary in the New York Times.

We're #3! We're #3! We're #3!

The Measure of America is a cool book, if you're into that kind of thing.  Barring taking an actual physical book home, follow the American Human Development Project online.

I have to wonder about the Native figure, and not just because of articles like this.  I read that the average life expectancy of a reservation-based male is 45 years, and a reservation-based female is 48 years.  That could be because the infant mortality rate is 8 times that of whites - Tota died at 93 (depending on the birth certificate), after all - but I don't really know how statistics work.

I also know you can't compare a Pine Ridge with an Akwesasne, that Famous Mistake is always made when discussing Indians.  Lumping us together into one big Native American Population is like equating Italy with Scotland with Poland, but can I expect anything better from people who see the world like this:

Maybe since they're measuring America and the Indians are actually sovereign nations, the reservation folks didn't even factor into that life expectancy chart, who knows.  The good news is, Becky will only be alone for seven years instead of eleven.

And our .8s match, isn't that cute?

Don't I Know You?

A couple years after I began working at Books & Books, novelist Karen Shepard stopped by to sign stock of Don’t I Know You? for the stores.  

The ARC of Don’t I Know You? had caught my eye because of the letter she’d included.  In the letter, Shepard explained that she’d written the novel because of her fascination with a childhood classmate whose mother had been murdered.  

Like many explorations of childhood, writing the novel became partially about the discrepancy between how she remembered the incident and what had actually happened, but it was also an exploration of why this classmate haunted her.  

He kept cropping up in her fiction.  This letter called to me because whenever I wrote anything with characters younger than eighteen, sooner or later a childhood friend I’ll call Alex would appear.  

I grew up in East Syracuse, Alex grew up in Minoa.  We went to school together from fourth to twelfth grade, and sat together at the Brain table in junior high and high school.  Alex had four or five brothers, I’m not sure which.  He lived forty minutes to an hour’s ride from my suburb, in farm country.  When we were in fifth grade, his oldest brother deliberately killed himself, in front of Alex, with a gun.  

I remember it as a shotgun to the head but I’m not sure.  I remember his older brother was in high school, but I’m not sure about that, either.  I know Alex saw a psychiatrist the rest of his school career.  I know none of us ever mentioned the suicide, not once in eight years.  

There were times it seemed like he wanted to talk about it, like when he’d bring up the psychiatrist, but none of us followed up on anything he said.  We’d laugh at things Alex told us about the psychiatrist because he was joking and we wanted him to be happy, not because it was funny.  I don’t know whether we should have been better listeners, or if we should have been more curious.  I know I write about him to answer all of those questions I never asked as kid.

Don’t I Know You? turned out to be excellent.  Since Mitchell was out of town, he asked if I’d meet her and play host while she signed.  

Shepard was lovely, intelligent, and forthright.  She brought some relatives who embarrassed Shepard with tales of her success.  Shepard told me that when you’ve written a novel, the way to arm yourself from criticism and worry about how the book will perform is to be involved in your next novel.  She looked up from the stack of hardcovers she was signing, head cocked to the side.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve written something without being involved in the next project.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

Empire of Women was published in 2001, Bad Boy’s Wife in 2004, and Don’t I Know You? in 2006.  If we have to wait much longer, I guess we can assume it didn’t go well.  In the meantime, Don’t I Know You? remains a strong backlist seller for Books & Books.  I’ve enjoyed recommending it to book clubs and helping new readers discover it, and no one has come back to me disappointed.  

I told Shepard about Alex, of course.  I told her I’d cast Alex as a main character in the book I was writing, and I hoped I’d never see him again once it was finished.  She was most curious as to how time had played with the memory, but I told her proximity to Alex had probably stopped my imagination from running wild.  

I asked her if writing Don’t I Know You? had worked for her, if her childhood friend had stopped haunting her fiction.

“I’ll let you know how that turns out, too,” she said.

Do Not Enter Room 1408

I went to the Southern Independent Bookseller’s Association conference in Daytona last month. Growing up, I remember Daytona as an iconic party destination, a place I’d go when I was old enough for Spring Break and underwent a personality transplant. Today it’s like the city time forgot. If you want to film an 80s period piece, you could do it in Daytona by moving the cars.


Thankfully, Daytona’s time-capsule surreality is virtually undetectable at night, when we checked in. I’m thankful, because The Plaza gave us room 1408.




If you’re unfamiliar with the Stephen King short story or the John Cusack movie, 1408 is really on the thirteenth floor, but relabeled the 14th for superstitious guests. Both stories are about a man who spends his nights in haunted hotels and writes about them. The hotel manager loses a lengthy court battle and is forced to rent the room to the haunted writer. In both versions, 1408 adds up to 13.


If you’re unfamiliar with Becky and I, we drove four hours and paid (well, she paid) top dollar for a one-night-only Q & A with Stephen King in Sarasota for a book we already owned, read, and loved.


When the clerk handed us the room keys, 1408 rang a vague bell. I’ve read the story twice and I own the movie, but thinking about the Reading Group Panel I would be on first thing in the morning distracted me.


On the elevator, I got a kick out the fact that the floor numbers skipped from twelve to fourteen.


In the hallway, walking toward our room, I finally made the connection.


I stopped and turned to Becky with realization.


“Room 1408,” I said, “1408.”


“I know, right? Ocean view!”


“No, don’t you see? It’s from that Stephen King story.”


By her terrified expression and the sudden tears in her eyes, I saw that Becky did indeed see.


“What? Why, why would you- What do we- No, no-”


Imagining the headlines had me spooked; SIBA Booksellers Check In to 1408 But Never Check Out. Real-Life Stephen King Story in the Town that Time Forgot. Booksellers Gone Wild at Daytona. But seeing how freaked out she was, I immediately backtracked.


“It’s fine, I’m sure we’ll be fine.”


“That’s what stupid people in horror movies always say before they get it.”


We stood there for a while like 6’3” halfbreed Hansel and 5'1" Cuban Gretel, lost on horrific carpeting instead of in the woods. Ultimately, the lure of an ocean view was too strong. She realized that in the stories, electronic card keys don’t work in room 1408. If the card worked, we’d be fine. It did, and we were.

It's The Dolphin Hotel in both versions, and this was the sign outside our door.  Yeesh.

What horrors lurk inside room 1408? Itchy towels, a dearth of glassware, and too much trashy reality TV.


Sorry to spoil the ending.

Stranger Danger

“Dylan, what do you do if a stranger comes up and tries to talk to you?”




A sexual predator had moved into Miami Shores and Becky was just being a responsible parent, making sure Dylan was instilled with a healthy fear of strangers. Her question made the bottom drop out of my stomach. I looked at Dylan and couldn’t even imagine him coming to harm.  How could anyone - ?



I’d known him a few scant months at that point. It’s one more thing Becky has carried as a mother, but she’s probably only allowed those thoughts fleeting attention as he's grown up; I got mine all at once, over breakfast.



A few weeks later, Dylan and I were playing in Becky’s kitchen when he suddenly turned serious.



“Aaron, do you know Adam Walsh?” he asked softly.



Dylan had hidden in a clothing rack at Sears to trick Becky a few days before. She’d freaked out, of course. She told him about Adam Walsh, who’d been his age, and taken from a Sears, and murdered.



Matching Dylan’s conspiratorial tone, I told him I didn’t know Adam Walsh, but I knew who he was.



“Is it true someone took him away from the store and killed him?”



“Yes,” I said.



“Is it true they cut off his head?”



Becky gave me two rules in helping raise her child. 1 – never hit him. 2 – answer anything he asks truthfully.



“Yes.” (He was obsessed with this detail for a few days, and Becky had leisure time to repent what she’d told him in the heat of the moment)



Dylan got that faraway look which indicates his little mind is churning; then we played Pirates some more.



He just turned six years old, the same age as Adam, taken about forty minutes north of where I’m typing this. Whether I can fathom it or not, there are people out there who would like to harm him.



As the youngest of three, or six if you include the cousins, I’ve often said that I envy Dylan’s childhood. I grew up with hand-me-downs and a third (or a sixth) of the attention, while he is lavished with the gifts and love of an entire family.



But his is a different world than mine. Fear of strangers is as much a part of Dylan’s life as Nintendo.



Yesterday, we took our first bike ride through the new neighborhood. We used the sidewalk in deference to his age. Another biker passed us in the road, coming in the opposite direction. I said hello, and instructed Dylan to do the same.



“Hello!” Dylan cried enthusiastically. The mustachioed, sunglass-wearing man smiled and nodded in passing.



“Why did you make me say hi to a stranger?” Dylan moaned.



Oops. I’m learning all about Stranger Danger from my six-year-old.

Adam

The made-for-television move Adam played on October 10th, 1983, six days before I turned eleven. In the ads, the parents wandered darkened streets, calling their boy’s name, then the screen went blank. The cries continued in voiceover as the letters of the boy’s name flashed across the screen.



Reading Les Standiford and Joe Matthew’s Bringing Adam Home made me remember the ads for Adam for the first time twenty-seven years, but a line from the movie didn’t need prompting from any book. It was the last line I heard before my parents sent me to bed. The words have echoed through my mind ever since, equipment hanging close at hand, leaping into my consciousness any time I hear a certain word or inflection. The man who played John Walsh, teeth clenched in rage, chokes back tears as he tells his wife, “They found his head.”



My parents probably wanted me to watch so I’d learn about what would come to be called Stranger Danger. I think they realized I might learn a little too much.



I took my time going upstairs, looking over my shoulder every step. The boy was dead? How was that possible? Children didn’t die in movies, and let alone movies that were supposed to be real.



By the time I heard that line, the nation had been obsessed with this tragedy for nearly two years. More than my family’s worry, more than being ten-going-on-eleven, I think the line has stuck with me because I never found out what happened.



Apparently another hour of TV wouldn’t have done me any good; it took twenty-five years to solve this one.



Toward the end of Bringing Adam Home, when members of the killer’s family reveal the knowledge they’ve shared for so long, I was forcibly reminded of Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise. All the locals knew who took an axe to Jentz and her best friend on a camping trip some decades before, just as it was “common knowledge” in the killer’s family that he’d murdered Adam Walsh. Bringing Adam Home will enrage you for what ifs, near misses, and unspoken truths. It’s emotionally wrenching and impossible to put down.



Detective Joe Matthews’ struggle to give closure to the Walsh family makes this book more than just an excellent police procedural. The way Eric Larson's Devil in the White City sets up the Chicago World’s fair as the playground of two men - one the architect who dreamt it into existence, the other the killer who stalked it - Bringing Adam Home uses Adam Walsh’s abduction and murder to speak about good versus evil, the best of men’s nature against its absolute worst.  Once you begin reading, you won't be able to put it down.



Since finishing the book, I’ve looked at Dylan - six, the same age as Adam when he was abducted – and can’t help thinking of what happened to Adam Walsh.  I force these images from my mind, realizing what happened is beyond comprehension.



I can’t let the world’s darkness spoil my time with this amazing kid. All I can do is scoop him up and smother him with kisses, to try and show him he’s loved.

Welcome to My Nightmare

I had a disturbing dream about the one we called Anastasia. At least, in the dream her name was Anastasia (or Anastasia’s real name, I should say). When I woke, I realized she looked nothing like Anastasia. Tall and lean, a mix of Latin and black-Cuban, with a crazed mane of almost-dreadlocked hair and bright green-gray eyes. This wasn’t Anastasia, it was Andi. Or rather, Andi as a character called “Marie” in a short story I wrote some years back.

We kissed, this dream version of Andi / Anastasia / Marie and I. Lying side by side on a huge couch, fully clothed, much like the first kiss Andi and I shared on her parent’s couch in 1993. Except in the dream, my heart wasn’t in it.

This wasn’t a what if dream where your significant other doesn’t exist; I was fully aware of Becky the entire time. I felt no heat. This kiss felt wrong, like a violation, but I went through the motions anyway.

The guilt was compounded by waking up curled around my love, my Cleopatra, my Becky.

I moved to the computer but couldn’t write, which is how I usually wrap my mind around problems. This dream couldn’t be more obvious. I have moved on from my marriage, the court date is set, but I still have some unresolved emotions. The end of my marriage still hurts, and I should figure out why. Becky and I have moved quickly, and I need to acknowledge my smidge of doubt (not about her, of course, but myself).

For some reason, I got it in my head that Andi should pick me up and drive me to the court hearing where we will be finally divorced. Maybe we’ll even have breakfast afterward. That way, if there are things to be said, we can. Closure, they call it, if such a thing exists outside of wishful thinking.

I also think the dream is telling on another level; I’m done going through the motions of love. When I look in Becky’s eyes, it’s like drowning in happiness, lust, chocolate - a welcome, joyous flood of sweetness and death. Like writing, it’s those moments when I feel the presence of God in my life and know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

If you lose that feeling, it’s time to move on.

It Could Always Be Worse

Clichés are the bane of a writer’s existence. They are also comforting for people in turmoil. In titling this post, I asked the writer version of me to turn aside in favor of plain old Aaron.

I just re-read a scrap of diary I titled Dark Night of the Soul, a perfect piece for putting my current misery into perspective. I’m frustrated over how long losing the defining relationship of my life has hurt. Understandable. But think about Tuesday, October 6th, 2009, when I came closer to suicide than any point in my life since 1980 [Yes, I tried to kill myself when I was eight years old, but the difficulty I’ve had editing this proves it’s more than I can explore here. In the end I removed that experience from this post. Suffice to say it was a genuine attempt, and it caused my parents to finally look at what alcoholism was doing to our family]. It’s a common experience for the third-born Child Of an Alcoholic, called the Lost Child, to attempt suicide without knowing why. Last fall, I knew exactly why I wanted to end my life.

A David Foster Wallace character said you kill yourself for the same reason people jump from a burning high-rise. He’d know, of course. I might not be able to describe the exact mix of emotions which leads to the point of desiring oblivion, but the Wallace quote does a decent job.

Although I’ve contemplated suicide often enough over the years, I’ve never forgotten how God spared me as a child (to clarify, I use God and Satan metaphorically, as shorthand to express myself, not to imply a biblical faith or a religious belief; human thoughts can not measure or define God). Even on my worst Dark Night of the Soul, I still believed that God never tests us with more than we can handle. You promise yourself the burden will become easier to bear, so you’ll carry it another day.

Then it gets better.

You’re humble enough to ask for companionship, and your friends surround you like campers nurturing a lick of flame into a fire, and it gets better.

Your family listens to you ramble, and it gets better.

You find a group of amazing women, ostensibly to discuss books, and it gets better.

You see a soul-fueling concert, and it gets better.

Your cat comes home, and it gets better.

The frangipani blossoms fall, Coldstone Creamery serves a Milk and Cookies shake, you write, you drink, you bike, you work, you think, you breathe in and out, and it gets better.

You meet someone special, a Queen of the Nile who feels like finding shelter after months wandering a storm, and it gets better.

I promise, it always gets better.

Relationships are Compromise

As romantic as it is to believe two people could be so made for each-other that they’ll have no adjustments to make in coming together, it just ain’t so. Whether as superficial as he-doesn’t-find-That 70’s Show-funny and she-finds-Seinfeld-characters-annoying, as silly as she-doesn’t-put-the-cap-back-on-the-toothpaste and he-leaves-his-towels-on-the-bathroom-floor, or as serious as what brand of peanut butter should be stocked and whether mushrooms are delicious or evil, you are going to have to give a little to get a little.

This is why people stay single. People happy with their lives often develop a vague notion that they want to share their happy lives, but that’s all they want to do: share their lives. As in, here, see how great my life is? Let’s both live my life together!

Sorry, you can’t expect a partner to be nothing but a reflection.

I’m not saying this is difficult or the process is contentious, I’m just stating a fact. You will change each-others lives, and some of those changes will challenge you.

Take, for instance… the first birthday in a new relationship. Let’s say your girlfriend wants to go see the Instruments of Torture Through the Ages exhibit at the Miami Freedom Tower. Let’s say you have had perhaps a dozen dreams over the years about torture, the images of which have not left you, the vividness of them making you wonder about past lives. Let’s say your new girlfriend, who while cute as a bug’s ear apparently harbors a heretofore unsuspected fascination with real live actual torture devices discovered in European antique stores and private collections, let’s say she really, really wants to go.

Do you tell yourself, confronting torture devices will exorcise these demons and I won’t have to worry about Medieval dungeons when I close my eyes again? Or do you say, have fun, Becky?

My decision to attend the torture exhibit is not without precedent. I took Andi to see Bodies: The Exhibition on her 34th birthday when I had no personal interest, and more than a little worry that I’d be creeped out. My imagination made it much more graphic than it turned out to be, and I found it fascinating. I hoped to have a similar experience with torture.

We found our first grammatical error – good ol’ your vs. you’re – on a poster before we even entered the exhibit. This same series of poster boards claimed that the desire to inflict pain, even humiliation, suffering, and torment on our fellows, is a part of being human. I don’t agree. I think better of us. I think certain cultures and circumstances might lend themselves to it, but I don’t think we’re born with torturous instincts.

Anyway, how was the exhibit? Rife with grammatical and spelling errors. They should be ashamed.

As far as seeing the devices goes, try NOT thinking about a blue-eyed polar bear for the next sixty seconds. You’ve heard that one, right? Well, once you’ve seen them, try not thinking about… the Saw. The Wheel. The Impaler. The Goat’s Tongue. The Breast Ripper, Thumb Screws, Pinchers, Scissors, the Pear, Flaying, The Judas Cradle. The posters out front promised the exhibit would provoke revulsion, and it did. But the exhibit failed in its promise to make me think about torture as it’s still used today. It’s grotesque. A walk through the valley of but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I.

Still, it caused a melancholy that’s been difficult to shake. I haven’t been thinking of water boarding, psychotropic drugs, or whatever I was supposed to think about, but the ills we allow to happen in the name of civilization. There are a lot. What they have in common is that I feel helpless to do anything about them.

How can I? I couldn’t even get Becky to go see Kick Ass instead of the guillotine.

2.23.2010 - The Three Year Anniversary

A friend of mine was mildly disfigured about the face in a car accident some years back. I say “mildly” because I think the scar is sexy, but I’m not a young, gorgeous woman, so what could I know about wearing it? And missing teeth are never sexy, except on hockey players. Anyway, she wrote her obituary afterwards as a cathartic exercise. After my own accident, she suggested I do the same.

Resisting the powerful urge to edit, I present the obituary as I wrote it forty-eight days after the fact:

On February 23rd, 2007, Aaron John Curtis of Miami, Florida lost his life in a traffic accident at the age of 34. Paramedics airlifted him to Jackson Memorial Hospital’s famed Ryder Trauma Center, but he died on route due to injuries sustained at the scene. While Aaron eventually settled in Miami, he also lived in Richmond, Virginia, Syracuse, New York, and Akwesasne (the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation). Had Harper Collins published the book he finished but never quite liked, or had he finished the two books he liked very much and published them, or had he started the two potential Fantasy and Mystery series and had them published, any one of these places may have fought for the right to bury him rather than forgetting he had been there at all. In addition to these unseen works, he also never produced four scripts and never published 29 essays and 30 short stories of varying quality. Aaron is survived by everyone in his family he had known since he was born (except Uncle Fran and Grandma and Grandpa on his father’s side - and what a crazy fucking thought that is, considering all the white trash and filthy Injuns out there who are related to him), each relationship also of varying quality. He met his wife of eight years in 1992 and they never stopped loving each-other, so at least he did something right. Maybe the important thing.

Three years ago today, I knew I was going to die. The car came at me and color bled from the day as God took me out of the equation for a few moments. I didn’t know I’d be back. I didn’t see my life pass before my eyes, I felt my entire emotional life happening all at once, every friend and family member I’ve ever loved and who ever loved me. It was a moment that seemed to last forever, but I didn’t even have time to finish a single thought before the world went white.

If only- I thought, then nothing but white.

Given decades instead of milliseconds, I don’t know how I would have ended that sentence. Maybe the rest of my life is the end of that sentence.

I’ve rewritten my obituary a few times. Once, when I lost some time around an MTBI while biking (that’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, which is what they’re calling a mild concussion nowadays), I made that the inciting accident, but usually I just edit the emotional truth.

Let me make clear, I’ve never lived on Akwesasne. I’m a halfbreed, and we often have chips on our shoulders about not being Indian enough. I was up there a lot as a child and I’m closer with my mother’s side of the family, but I never lived there. I find it odd I’d want to die on a lie. Let’s call it dying on a wish.

I mentioned Harper Collins because they were looking at Scratch the Dead Places. At the time, it was still called Skritch Skratch Man. My cover letter was a chatty invitation for coffee with every cover letter cliché and mistake an aspiring writer is supposed to avoid. I even asked Stacy for some craptastic cover art. Of course they didn’t publish this unpalatable, unpublishable mess. Brimming with excitement at meeting my personal goal of writing a book, wildly optimistic when our Harper Collins sales rep offered to bring it back to the New York offices with him, I subjected an industry shaker with the insult of a first draft.

It was a difficult time for friends and family. To know me was to be subjected to three hundred pages of what amounted to a writing exercise.

“All the white trash and filthy Injuns.” From the litany of unpublished works listed in the obit, it’s clear I was worried no one would see and appreciate my work. My resentment at not having the right publishing pedigree manifested itself in this lame attempt at self-deprecating humor.

There was a question written on the back wall of my seventh grade English teacher’s classroom; “Will it matter that I was?” I think Mr. Genarro wanted to inspire us to greatness, not haunt us for life, but what are you gonna do? Since I almost ended, I was worried about my legacy.

Yes, getting outside notice feels good. Yes, I could use the validation and the money. Yes, it’s largely luck and who you know. But opportunity is luck plus preparation. I’m fortunate enough to love a profession which, all trumpeting over wunderkinds like Zadie Smith or Dave Eggers aside, embraces late-bloomers. Right now, I’m happy enough preparing.

The obit ends with the one thing which made me know I’d lived my life right; my marriage. Well, I still think I did the important thing right, warts and all. Love with your whole heart in this life, or get busy dying by slow degrees.

I suppose the only satisfying ending, the only fitting ending, is a three-year anniversary obituary.

Maybe later. Sorry to be a blog tease, but that sounds pretty fucking morbid.

Back at the Bottom of the Pyramid

When you meet someone at nineteen and manage to keep them until you’re thirty-six, people look at you a certain way. You must know some trick of love or life that they’re missing. You’re happy in a way they’ll never be . . . if you’re speaking of your love in a certain way, of course.

Something I missed in this post which is important to clarify because people who didn’t know us as a couple are starting to read this blog, Andi and I were that couple. We genuinely enjoyed each-other’s company, made our decisions as a team, always had each-other’s backs, and spoke in glowing terms about our partner and our relationship. People admired what we had and, I flatter myself to think, wanted it in their own relationships.

I remember a few years back, three of us men were in the stockroom at Books & Books. Guy talk, you know? My friend (who we’re calling) Graham is about twelve years older than me, married for twenty years. My other friend JC is a bit younger, and had married only recently.

Even though he’s a house-husband, Graham belongs in a sitcom from the fifties. He was bitching about his wife using the most clichéd clichés. Because I’d been with Andi for thirteen years at that point, Graham tried using me as an example to back up a point he was making with JC.

Graham wanted to know I felt about my wife.

“I love her more with each passing day.”

JC and Graham braced themselves, waiting for the punchline. I looked back and forth between them.

“That’s it,” I said.

Graham shrugged off this minor hiccup and continued to say how he’d rather masturbate than have sex with his wife, or whatever the story was at the moment. Then he paused, returning to me.

“Wait, do you have kids?”

“No,” I said.

“That explains it,” he said. Like, have kids and then talk to me about married life.

If you believe Graham (and Bill Cosby), married people without children can’t talk about married life, the same way people with one child can’t talk about parenting to people with multiple children.

Maybe that’s true, but the Smug Relationship Pyramid topped by wrinkled oldsters celebrating fifty years together, surrounded by gaggles of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, that pyramid was built by sad sack singletons who think anything beyond a few years is worth memorializing in a power ballad.

It’s important to distinguish Power Singles from Sad Sack Singletons. Most Power Singles I know are women in their forties and fifties. Some of them have been married, but not all. The thing which unifies them is they’ve had their men and it didn’t impress them all that much. They’d rather have their own space than share it with someone sub-par.

To Sad Sack Singletons, there is no greater glory than marriage. To anyone.

When I became a member of the recently-separated, people handled me like an egg. Little did I know, that was only a stop on my way to becoming another statistic, another story, another failed marriage. Yeah, you’re marriage busted up. Score one for you, now get over it.
I refuse to categorize my marriage as a failure because it ended. Everything living dies, which is the tragic beauty of life. I’d rather drop dead of a massive stroke when I’m biking at eighty-five than linger until a hundred and five and be unable to remember my own name.

Scratch that; I’d rather have a massive stroke in my sleep at a mentally vibrant hundred and five than linger to a doddering hundred and ten.

Since I won’t be part of a wrinkled couple celebrating fifty years, I’ll never know whether our marriage would have been a tree forever sprouting new growth, felled only by one of our deaths, or if it would have looked healthy to an outsider, yet have been riddled with years of rot inside. Either way, I’ve got to let it go.

What’s bothering me lately is how my world view has been rocked. The loss of Andi as a person is incidental to the loss of my marriage as the defining thing in my life, and to realizing that love doesn’t conquer all.

I've heard I could ruin the present worrying about the future. Too true. Ditto, mooning over the past.

Bounce

Maria always wanted a bounce-house for her thirtieth birthday. With the guests ranging in age from twenty-two to sixty-five, injuries included – but were not limited to – lost fingernails, pulled groins, a broken toe, and one torn ACL which required surgery. I avoided injury by learning from the mistakes of my fellow party-goers. When it came time to fall, better to release your body and let it happen then to fight it.

My abdomen was sore for the entire week from all the bouncing I did. When you’re a kid running around, laughing and giddy until you don’t have breath left, collapsing and laughing even harder, it’s an hourly occurrence. Given the right circumstances, anyway. Even as my parents drank and smoked themselves into lives of quiet desperation, as my brother and sister hung with the neighborhood toughs doing God knows what, I remember spinning and spinning in my neighbor’s yard with two girls, getting dizzier and dizzier, laughing to my bones as the three of us hit the grass together.

I’d forgotten what that felt like, but Maria’s birthday reminded me.

I’m not sure why it makes me think of death. Maybe because it’s all rushing by so quickly, it seems a blink from one moment to the other. Maybe because at midlife, my mind continually turns to the type of life I want to live, how I’m living it now.

To wring everything from life, to give it all I have, then collapse with exhausted laughter before I even realize I’m out of energy, I think that’s a good way to go.