A Wire Tied to a Kite

There is no question that I am at one of the oddest points in my life. I have emerged, I am emerging from a hibernation of sorts, and as I shake off the Rip Van Winkle fog of sleep, I look around and nothing is as I left it before she came into my life.

At the beginning, I was a child in a twenty-something’s body, recovering from the cacophony of the sixties. She led me by the hand, but I would have followed her through a thunderstorm, buck naked, holding the end of a wire tied to a kite and thought my troubled days were over. But life rarely goes as planned and the gods conspired, one moment she was holding her side in pain; the next she was under the surgeon’s knife. In that instant I knew I couldn’t live without her, and before she could walk without help, I knelt before her and asked her to share her life with me and her answer was forever.

Now fifty years have passed. I flash through memories as if they were pages in a flipbook. Like shuffling through the I Ching, I can stop at any point in time and find new meaning in those moments.

The year before we married, just learning how to walk in step with each other was a challenge. One day we parked the car in the Village, and she was so intent on the story she was telling that she walked backward into a tree on the sidewalk. Our carefree days before children. Sunday breakfasts in bed. Sections of the Times passed to me because the article proved her point, a point I’d never doubted. It all seems like yesterday.

Her mom and dad. The children. Our sons. Struggling to become the best parents we could possibly be, trying to make up for the child we lost. The pace, the rat race, punctuated by bits of time away as a family.

The care and feeding of the boys was her calling, as was her love of the written word, the way she owned the stacks, her name on cards pinned to the shelves, an enticing blurb beneath to pique the interest of browsers who then came to ask her for a recommendation for their uncle bobby.

The memories swirl around my mind. I feel dizzy. And yes, those smudges on the pages are from teardrops.

I spend hours each day with these memories. I embrace them because she isn’t here for me to hold close, for me to kiss her neck and feel her lips press against mine. The shock is not the memories themselves. It is the reflection I cast in the mirror when Rip Van Winkle stares back at me in wonder. And like Rip, I turn to look to find that no one’s left standing, I am alone in my remembering.

I hear rumblings in the mountains, they must be knocking ninepins, and I must find my kite.

I hear their thunder.