Time

My husband died five and a half years ago, and in the last year, I have found myself thinking of him far less often than I did during the first four years after his death, which I believe is "normal." I used to talk to him constantly inside my head, despite a great skepticism that, even if he still existed in some way, on some level, he could instantly hear my thoughts, and instantly respond to them. I still talk to him occasionally, but it's very occasional. And the brief but bereft bouts of crying, once so common, are very rare indeed.

The other morning when I was washing dishes -- along with cooking, something I seem to do on a non-stop basis -- the song 100 Years by Five For Fighting, which sounds like a group but is actually a single performer, came on the radio. This is a neat-sounding song that, if you listen carefully to the lyrics, reveals itself to be awkwardly written, not making much sense if you follow it beginning to end. Nonetheless, the following lines caused me to stop scrubbing an egg-smeared plate, and spend a good minute and a half crying:

"I'm 22 for a moment
She feels better than ever
And we're on fire
Making our way back from Mars.
15, there's still time for you
Time to buy and time to lose
15, there's never a wish
better than this
When you only got 100 years to live."*

The reason I stood there and cried for a couple of minutes, to the accompaniment of this not-very-good rock song, was that it made me think of Micheal and me when we were young. Not 15, but 17 and 18, which is how old we were when we met. We were young, beautiful (I thought I was horribly plain, but a look back at old pictures has shown me that I really wasn't...and Micheal was indisputably one good-looking, sexy dude), madly in love, with no thought of ever getting old, dying, any of the awful, real things that happen in life.

He lived in Terrell, Texas; I lived an hour away in Ft. Worth. Sometimes in the middle of the week he would drive over when he got off from work at the all-night service station (Micheal was a high school dropout when we first met, which meant being a gas station attendant was about all he could hope for). I would still be sound asleep and would suddenly hear my little brother Bobby -- now a talented, weighed-down-with-responsibility cartoonist, husband and father -- sing out "Mike, Pauline's boy's here!" (Pauline was Micheal's mother, and my stepmother's second cousin. Oh, those southerners.) So I'd have to hastily get dressed, eat some breakfast, with an infatuated Micheal looking on, and then we'd go riding around, run errands for my stepmother, and always, at some point, wind up at a nearby drive-in. Either we'd order from one of the carhops who actually came out to your car and took your order or, if it were just too damn hot (in Texas, a not-infrequent occurrence), we'd go inside and sit in a booth, which had the additional benefit of enabling us to play songs from the juke box menu that every table had in a little glassed-in box. We'd feed the box nickels (nickels!), savor our root beer floats, and talk about I haven't a clue what, but we never stopped talking.

How fleeting that time was, and yet, because we were young, it seemed to last forever.

Life is all about loss. It is about acquiring, and losing. If you live long enough, you lose just about everything you worked so hard to acquire: job, fame, wealth, health, spouse, children, home, friends. You find yourself living alone -- a not-really-healthy way to live -- standing at a kitchen sink, weeping to a rock song, as you remember the hot, sunny days, the cold, delicious root beer floats, the happy hormones dancing through your body, the hope, the faith, the obliviousness to Time. Who is the enemy, and the boss.

*100 Years, by Five for Fighting, c. Five for Fighting Music, Inc., c. Emi Blackwood Music, Inc.