Stanley

Stanley had lived his life as most men do. He had worked, married, had two children, a boy and a girl, and raised them well. Better said, he provided the means for his wife to do that, for with her first pregnancy, she had quit her job as an elementary school teacher to stay home and raise children. Stanley went up the ladder and became successful, though his job kept him away from home much of the time. Midwesterners with midwestern values, they enjoyed simple things, wholesome meals and Christmas specials on TV and trips to the State Fair. The children grew and went to college and began their own lives, after which they were too seldom heard from or seen. Stanley retired and he and his wife decided it was time to leave the cold winters of life behind, and they bought a beautiful condo on the crystal waters of the west coast of Florida. It was time to enjoy themselves. It was time to travel.

From the outside, the marriage looked like many. The intimacy that had built up over the years took the form of shared experiences, of memories that differed in modest ways, of arguments that had been put aside through mutual agreement, marginalized to the form of bickering. And like other couples who stay together a lifetime, that had become their intimacy. Stanley wasn't a man you wanted to hug. There was nothing wrong with him in particular, but like old dogs that become misshapen and lumpy with age, with hair grown course and thin, and arthritic bones and shortened tendons that make rising a miserable duty, he had through practice become grumpy and solitary, taking his cup of coffee to the porch in order to smoke. Alone.

Observing him, you might wonder what cranky ideas went on in his head, wonder what resentments he argued with himself, ever his logic triumphing over the wrongness of the world. There, in his own mind, like the rest of us, he won again and again the victories that were becoming ever more elusive elsewhere. But like that old dog lying in the sun, paws twitching and legs flinching in some invisible race where once again it is young, chasing squirrels and rabbits with grace and agility, he thought of things you or I might not guess, of unknown pleasures he might once again pursue.

We can never be ready when it happens, that failing of the body, the first inkling of wrongness, the obvious betrayal of matter and of time.

Like Willy Loman, we are all heros in the end, the magnificent sacrifice we call our lives.