Letters to Girls: Present Participle

Dear Susan:

On a recent visit to our 'hometown", I drove by your house.  Not your house, of course, but your parents' house on 56th.  And, of course, it probably isn't even their house anymore.  It has been, after all, over forty years.  Nonetheless, I had a definite feeling as I did so.... the same exact feeling I had driving by once and seeing you sitting on the step by the front door.  In those days, 56th was the path between my grandparents' house and the mall, a Mecca of sorts for the likes of me (the word bumpkin comes to mind, having come from an even smaller rural town).  Today, though, the mall is gone; torn down, actually, in favor of a new trendy community designed with optimism in the previous economy, so today the land sits vacant.  56th today is the path between my parents' house (who enlarged my grandparents' tiny abode and moved in after retirement thirty years ago) and the cemetery overlooking the city where my mother is buried.  It is odd that all those elements--the empty front stoop, the empty mall lot, and a gravesite--all speak of absence.

Of past girlfriends (and you were that, though briefly) you are the most remote.  Did you ever stop to think that your present home is almost exactly as far away from me as you could get without leaving the planet? (115 + 71 = 186 degrees), so that if I were to push a needle from my house through the the exact center of the earth, it would emerge on the far side of the globe and probably poke you in the butt if you happened to be sitting down. 

And how, exactly, do I know all that about your exact whereabouts, your coordinates, not having actually spoken in that span of time since Robert Kennedy was assassinated, since the first Earth Day, since graduation when we both departed: me for the elite coast on my mission of money, and you to the ivory coast on your mission of peace?  How do I know that you later migrated Down Under?  How indeed.  It was first by gossip and alumni mags and later by internet stalking, because you (among all my more obscure citizen-friends) stand out like a google sore thumb. 

You have done well.  Your mission of peace also brought you accomplishment of the professional kind and, I also read, of the Mom kind…. and now, Lord help us, of the spiritual kind. 

In that journey to the opposite side of the earth, did you ever think of me?

Why this is important, see, has less to do with trying to connect, as it were, than it has to do with tracking the lifelong patterns that have presented themselves in my so-called life, not, mind you, for any latter-day quest for improvement, but for introspection, for atonement.

I am trying to recall our last conversation.  If memory serves me well, it took place on a mid-landing of the stairwell of the department, mid-afternoon, amid the rush of our fellow students, not mid-semester, but near the end.  At that time, I was distracted by girlfriend number three, a graduate, a social worker, blonde, like yourself, but without the glasses (yours gave me the postulate that blond girls in glasses always look like they are smiling).  I keep thinking that our almost-too-casual relationship, born in the midst of the ill-defined sexual revolution, did not allow us to acknowledge the seriousness of itself (after all, BOTH of us had other things--other people--going on at the time).  At least, for now, that is my excuse.  I want you to know that I do acknowledge a conversation (perhaps the second-to-last) where I detected your longing for our hasty, and somewhat random, coupling to have more meaning, more inertia, than it seemed to have.  I mention this not to prove I'm a sensitive guy, but for you to know that of the few things I am good at, one of them is detecting nuance.  And that that penultimate talk we had still rings in my ears.

The final conversation though, on that stairwell, had to do with your discovering (on yourself, one presumes) a type of venereal disease (fairly benign, as present-day venereal diseases go) and that I should go get myself checked.   Fact is, I never did… but my 'clean' state kind of gave me license to walk sideways out of our obligations to each other and on with our respective lives, did it not? 

Still….

I read of your current spiritual quest (with a bit of disdain, I must say) and I ponder.  I think you should know that yes, our relationship, brief, fleeting, has carried itself (inertia) with me these past forty years, and yes, it has meant a lot.

2012

Reviews

[Wolfwind]

Time in a bottle poured forth. You have a way of narrating that really captures. I couldn't help but just sit back and ponder life and all it's twists while I read this. It certainly made me wonder if any of the past loves ever keep the past in thought as time moves on.

[Emily B]

oh, wow