Fate and Hope

A long day's reprieve.  Morning hardly broke with a gray, cold rain that told me not to move.  Stay home.  Read.  Sleep.  There were Christmas cards to write.  I wold eat.  But there was no food in the house.  The night before I got home from the studio at eleven p.m. having only had a bottle of champagne for dinner.  I'd looked for something to eat.  I found a three-hundred calorie frozen dinner.  Now the morning coffee and a hollow stomach.  I would have to go out to hunt and gather.  Still, the hollowness could be good.  I must get slender, I thought, and taut.  I would have to force myself to the gym.  It did not look good for staying in.

But I lingered.  I scooped a few spoonfuls of hard peanut that lacked oil as I had not stirred it up enough when I first opened it so that now it was hard and dry and crumbly, and I drizzled honey on top of it in the spoon.  There was enough milk left for a few swallows.  I sat and watched the rain.

By noon I had managed to get into some gym clothes.  Getting out of my car, I ran into some neighbors who I had known better when I was married.  They are Golden People, blessed with fantastic money they did nothing to obtain.  Her father had pioneered the first big cell phone service provider, sold fifty-one percent to AT&T, then went on to create Netscape.  While I was still married and we all would eat and drink together, she told us to watch Good Morning America the next day because they were interviewing her father.  He had just given $100 million to a state university, the largest donation ever given to a public school.  I guessed that if he was giving that much away to a college, he might have invested something in his daughter as well.  They had everything and everyone wanted to know them.  They would take large groups on skiing adventures to Colorado for weeks at a time.  And they were wonderful people, too, charming and friendly, and she, more than him, was down to earth.  He, perhaps, couldn't afford to be.  It is difficult, I imagine, to pretend you are head of the family under such circumstances.  But he did a good job nonetheless.

After the divorce, though, I had gone underground and now I got the automatic smiles and the thirty second conversations.  They had children and were living the life we all aspire to, so I understood completely.  We share less common ground than before.  But running into them on the way into the Y reminded me of things I didn't want to be reminded of just now.  We all spoke quickly without breaking stride.

Just as I was finishing up my workout, a friend I had never seen at the gym before came over to say hello.  His son was playing on a basketball team and they had a game today.  And so I went in to sit and talk with him when I was done.

He and his wife are attorneys and sitting there with them watching their son play ball, I was reminded that I was not part of that now, either.  Having spent the last five years doing this with my friend's son, I felt the growing gulf between this and this.  It is a fine thing all these basketball and soccer games and school dances and plays, as it keeps you from having to think about your own life and what you would like to do.  The satisfaction of watching happy children as deadly dull as all of it is comes to reassure you of something I am quickly forgetting just now.  I probably should join another gym, I was thinking as I sat in the family bleachers with my friends, someplace full of bouncers and 'roid boys who have too many troubles to count.  There I could consider myself lucky.

On the way home, I stopped at the local hardware store, a small, family owned business that has been in town since its inception, I think.  It is the sort of place that has everything--Red Ryder BB Guns, American Flyer Red Wagons, handmade knives, homemade candy, and kitchenware you can find nowhere else, old percolators and utensils you had forgotten about long ago.  On the way in, I ran into an old friend, another who I used to see much more when I was married.  But we are still friendly, though she has since married well and had two daughters and is part of that something that I used to know so well.

"Hey, you, Merry Christmas," she said smiling.

"Same to you," I said as we hugged.

We caught up through small talk.

"You still seeing the woman that has the son?"

"No," I said.

She gave a sympathetic frown and said oh.

"Of course not," I said, "It's Christmas."

"Yea, well. . . " she said uncomfortably, and then "I've got to pick up some things.  We have a big Christmas party to go to tonight.  I'm looking for a bird feeder that sticks onto the window for a present."

"If they don't have it here, you won't find it," I said.  And with that, we went our ways.

Home and showered, I wondered what to do.  The weather was still nasty.  I had gone to the grocery store, so there was no need to move now.  I putzed around with some photos I needed to process and made myself a not-so-perfect Americano.  And then too quickly the short day was done, the sun setting.  It was simply gone.  When it had been dark awhile, I decided to go out to get some dinner at a local fish place, some fish stew and a glass of wine.  Usually, I am greeted by name, but I had not been for awhile and all the counter help was new.  "Hello," a girl said brightly, "have you ever been here before?"  I gave her my order and chose to sit outside alone in the cool dampness, and when the stew came I seared my tongue with the first big bite.  Then again with the second.  I quickly drank the small chilled glass of white wine they had given me and watched the couples coming in from the parking lot smiling and holding hands, glad to be together and to have this to look forward to.  Everywhere tonight, there are parties, I thought, this last weekend before Christmas.  I had forgotten about them this year.  I hadn't received any invitations.  When I was married, we used to have a party on Christmas Eve every year.  It was always a glorious thing that began at a local wine bar where the requirement was that everyone bought a bottle of champagne.  The first year we had done this, we were not married.  We were making up for some reason and kissed in the parking lot before the big glass window before we had gone in.  When we looked inside, everyone was standing and applauding.  It was like that then.  And so we went into the warmth and bought champagne and the people we knew all did too, and the bar stayed open though they were closing because the owner could not turn down the money.  And each year more people joined us and the bar expected to stay open, and after we would all go back to my house and start the fire and eat and drink with our friends.  And when we were all good and drunk, we'd get into cars and drive with our headlights out through miles and miles of luminary-lined streets.  There were several neighborhood connected, each better than the other, and no house was left unlit.  And we were lit, too, on champagne and Xanax (there were always some people who were alone that year), and crowded into a few cars, we were all breathlessly floated past bright angels in the blue velvet dark.

I was remembering that as I rolled the tags of burned flesh on my tongue around the roof of my mouth.  The rain began to down harder.  I thought about the bottle of scotch I had waiting for me at home.

When I pulled into my driveway, I saw cars lining the street and crowded into the driveway of my neighbor.  He was having a Christmas party.  We have known each other for years, even before I moved into my house, and I used to get an invitation.  I wondered what had happened.  I had been invited to many parties and had to start at one and finish somewhere else.  I needn't worry about that tonight, I grinned.  

"How did I become this thing?" I asked myself knowing that I didn't have the energy to go to parties even if I were asked.  I tried to think of an answer.  "You must change."

It is easy to sit and stare with a glass of whiskey in your hand on nights like this, and to think of the past and of the future.  It is terrible, though, to sit and think of the present.  There it was, though, lying in rubble all about me.

I checked my email again.  I'd been waiting for something that never came.  Not that nor anything else.  "Don't dwell on it," I told myself practically.  "It won't change anything.  It won't help."

And the night wore on as nights will, and thinking made me sleepy.  I had been hoping for something all along, I knew.  We are helpless against it.  There is an awfulness in it that is inescapable.  Even a monk living in a solitary outpost must feel it, even after a lifetime of resistance.

But why resist, I finally concluded.  It is all there in books to read about.  You are trying the impossible.  You can be cynical, maybe, but you cannot avoid it.  There is Man's Fate.  But there is also Man's Hope.