Past
Posted on November 24, 2008
Filed Under marriage | 6 Comments
They arrived all California tan and under dressed for our bleak, bare Sunday. Having left here more than a year ago, they had forgotten how bitter the prologue to winter can be. We laughed at their thin coats and sun streaked hair. It was natural, unguarded, this teasing. There was great relief in finding their familiar faces on the doorstep, huddled against the cold. The way they spilled into the house was routine and I realized how much I’d missed them.
We shared lunch and coffee and tidbits of the year passed and then they presented us with just a tiny piece of personal fiction. There was context for the tale but I can’t remember what that segue might have been. It doesn’t matter. It was captivating in its ability to convey some distant past. It had the familiar tone of an old, time worn story, one he trots out when trying to underscore his wife’s tendency to worry, one she uses to defend her love for him. They told the tale like the couple that they are, that they have been. There was gentle prodding, an undercurrent of mockery, while arriving at the familiar but not entirely un-tender place this story takes them in its telling…
“It was Florida, before kids, we stopped at a rest stop on a remote strip of highway, a truck stop really,” he began.
“Entirely abandoned,” she said. “And really he was gone too long. Anyone would have worried.”
“Worried? maybe? But you convinced yourself I’d been jumped by red necks and sodomized in the Men’s Room? A step too far, no?”
“That was ages ago,” she added. “Ages.”
They both turned to me, shoulders up near their ears, palms spread out, offering up the universal sign for Please settle this matter that continues to grieve us all these years later.
I shook my head and got ready to say, Those were certainly the good old days, the salad days, a time when you were together in the world, just the two of you, without children, without a mortgage, possibly without even a car payment, unimpeded save for the fear of something happening to the other. It’s entirely sweet and sad, really, as it’s probably a relic, the last time the two of you stepped out in the world entirely consumed by one another.
But before I could get it out, this tribute to the people that they once were, this encouragement to savor that memory, our children, my two and their two, cartwheeled around the corner crashing into counter stools, demanding bagels, asking for something to do on a chill November afternoon.
She quickly jumped from her seat to pour juice. He followed his son to the upstairs bedroom to admire the Lego ship the boy had just made. I smiled and set to the task of slicing bagels and finding the cream cheese, all of us too distracted by the present to properly dissect the past.
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