At Last

Maybe it is because I have waited 47 years for this moment that it is more special to me than those who wait only 47 minutes, or 47 seconds, or not at all. Waiting is a dying grace. It has been murdered by efficiency and progress and its death has been applauded. As consequence, everything worthwhile has been devalued and ruined. Everything we all once had to wait for is that much cheaper. The young couple in the corner back there are on their first date two days after speaking for the very first time. The slick ones, all hot and heavy at the bar, just met ten minutes ago. Fast love, they call it. 

Maybe I wouldn't be such a nervous old man as I am now if I had met her on some dating website app thing, when those were all the rage. Swipe right or left. Click an X and they're gone forever. Dropped off the face of your universe. 

Somewhere there is a pile of people you swept left on. They mingle in the same downtown club hoping their luck will change. They are there for happy hour, or when their kids are at the other parent's house. Their lives have been irrevocably halved and they put themselves out there for consideration, for sale, but they never even know who it is who considers them. Only that they consider others in the same way and it is an efficient and worthwhile process. A sophisticated algorithm. A way of life. Resigned to their fate the way sheep to slaughter must be at some point. Or maybe they took a hobby, like suicide. Or worse, they found solace in the arms of someone else. Being with the wrong person is a slow death, I know. A lifelong drudgery, like having rheumatoid arthritis. A migraine that will not go away. A colonoscopy. A long enduring chronic illness that never has the courtesy to just kill you already. 

I think a lot when I'm nervous. I'm nervous now. You don't age out of nerves. My head is a fireworks factory and my nervousness is a sudden electrical fire. Roman candles and bengal fire fizzle and fizz everywhere. I think about when I met her. I never met her, persay. This will be the first time. 

I don't even know how I first saw her. She just appeared one day on Facebook, before the Chinese takeover, and I was instantly enamored. I was doing landscaping then. I was young and virile. I remember sitting in the dump truck when she posted a picture of herself in a red dress sitting in a big chair, presumably at some winery. She was playfully holding a wine glass, looking up to the heavens and smiling whimsically. I've never seen a more beautiful person in my life. I never considered who might have taken the picture. A husband or a boyfriend. I just didn't want to consider it. I would forever dodge the draft to that war. 

I started talking to her about something. I might have said she was beautiful. The obvious. What she has heard a thousand times over in a month from foreign and domestic would-be suitors. But in no way could I say it in such a way that it would be representative of my earnestness or of her just desserts. And in no way could I put her to words, or compliment her adequately with them. But it didn't stop me from trying. 

It has been 47 years now. I was 42 back then. She was thirty-something. She inspired me. I was a light-bulb and she was the current. She accepted my friend request and we began talking. I went home that night and didn't shower. I sat down sweaty and dirty at my laptop and wrote a beautiful story. Then another. And another. Word after word, thought upon thought. It all just came to me then as though seeing her face suddenly inspired me to write better than I did. Better than I was. 

I had fancied myself a writer before I saw her, but I wasn't that good. She was the unrealized dream I needed to dream to write well. I talked to her about conspiracy theories, mostly. Never anything personal. Not crazy conspiracies like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or anything. About Elvis being seen in a Burger King in Tulsa. Or JFK, Jr. surviving the crash and running for president in 2024 (which never came to pass, of course). About the metal in vaccinations. About homeopathic healthcare, chiropractory and big pharma. About freemasons and the Rockefellers. About alien abductions and celebrity pedophile rings. About hoaxes and holocausts and Jeffrey Epstein. Things I couldn't talk to anyone else about comfortably, she absorbed like a sponge and responded to in kind. 

At times, several months passed between messages, but about the time I thought her lost, inevitably she returned. Out of nowhere. I felt like the luckiest man on Earth to converse with her, even though it was never in person as I dreamed it would be. I dreamed we would meet in some pizza shop with beers between us and Bruce Springsteen on the jukebox. She was my drug. My get-through-life white lightening in a clay jug hidden in a box on my closet shelf. It was as though I knew the spot on Earth where the aliens land. And I was sitting there in my lawn chair to watch the brilliant spectacle of their repeated arrival and departure. It was as though I bumped into Jim Morrison in a paperback bookstore in Cleveland. It was finding a Picasso at a yard sale. She was no less than all that. 

I parlayed the inspiration she roused in me into a fairly successful writing career. I wrote about everything I wished to write. I impressed my family and kids and grandkids. I made enough money to go on vacation every year and watch tourists fall over themselves on the beaches of wherever I went and to see the looks on their kids' faces when they saw the ocean for the first time. That always made me smile. I've always been made happy by seeing kids happy. 

And as I am nearing the end of it, 89 years in, I can say that depsite the world's often gloomy circumstances, I have had a good life. A happy one, to boot. Still, I'd be lying to say that it was perfect. Relationships never worked out for me because I was never content with anyone I was with, which for many years I wrongly attributed to myself being a malcontent. There was always something missing and I couldn't stay happy with rheumatoid arthritis or psoriasis or kidney stones or diabetes or wheover she was. It wasn't that they were terrible and I was so good, it was only that we didn't fit. She wasn't her. 

Perhaps, in retrospect, it is unfair of me to liken them to chronic health conditions for they all gave me beautiful children and far less misery than I often exaggerate. And perhaps they are somewhere now, those that are still alive, thinking the same of me in a haze of regret. That I stole years and love from them disingenuously. I didn't live up to their expectations of me because there was always another woman in my mind. A someone they could not be who was out there, who I never had the chance to meet. 

She came between wife 2 and 3. Girlfriend 21 and 22-24. 24 who became wife 3, if that makes any sense. My love life is like some complicated mathematical code when names are put to numbers. There are many x's to solve in equations and y's to varying powers multiplied and divided, subtracted and added again. Children for products. Grandchildren and great grandchildren, whose names and birthdays I sometimes forget. I blame the dementia I don't have. I think many great-grandparents do. God forgive us. 

I am early. It's been a habit of mine for most of my life. I'm early to everything I want to be at, and late to anything I don't. I was late to two of my three weddings. I was late to work most days when I worked. I was early for all my kids' and grandkids' birthdays, which sometimes irked my exes. I will probably be early to my funeral. I sit here and think about it. How much is really left? Will I ever see the ocean again? Will I ever watch a baby eat cake or blow out her candles at another birthday? 

We all take birthdays for granted until a unspecified but certain time. They are special to us from 1 to 16 and then they're not special again until we are 75 or whatever age it is that we say, "Oh, shit." The first heart attack or cancer scare. When friends we know die left and right, when we go to more funerals than weddings. When life begins taking more things away from us than it gives. 

I can't say when my "oh, shit" moment was exactly, only that it passed and the aftermath of it left me in a state of lowgrade melancholy that no pills, books, or stories I conjure, or trips to the beach will ever cure. I suppose now I realize I wish I had known her better. Felt her in my arms. Kissed her at least once. Saw that twinkle in her eyes when she smiles in person, rather than in pictures. And I suppose that my "oh shit" moment caused me to be so bold as to ask her out on a date after 47 ridiculous years of me unsuccessfully flirting. Of passing back and forth every conspiracy theory, bunked or debunked. We have been friends on Facebook all that time, even after it became widely unpopular and I watched her entire life unfold, or what she shared of it, like it was my favorite, and seemingly unending, TV show. 

And here I am. Waiting in a posh steakhouse, though I am a vegetarian, because I remember from her past posts that she loves steak and she loves this place and so I asked her if she would like to meet me here for dinner. Several weeks elapsed before she responded to that message. I'd wake up and check my messages and write something, or go for a walk, or visit my great grandkids. Then finally, rather than a link to a website that swears that aliens built the pyramids, or that black neon light cures insomnia, or about the unexpected dangers of Astral projection, or about the shadow people of London, she replied, "Yes." 

It took two more weeks for her to agree to a date and time. But when it was all said and done, she did and so here I am. Wearing a suit I haven't worn in forty years. My favorite suit. My best suit. My funeral suit. Wondering if I'm overdressed. Clutching a fistful of orange lilies, which she said were her favorite flowers, twenty or so years ago. I dieted and exercised for three weeks before this, as though at 89 it would make a difference. I must be quite the sight, I realize. Sitting at the table alone waiting for her to arrive so I can stand up and get her chair, trying to hide the flowers beneath the table, wondering what I would say first. Hoping I would in some way impress her. Hoping to see her smile in real life so that I might die in peace. Sooner or later. 

I sip water while I wait, but I intend to order wine when she gets here. Courteous people walk past my table and smile at me. That's what they do when they see old people. The nice ones, anyway. They give you that sympathetic half-smile. They know you got one foot in and they feel sorry for you. Or maybe they're just nice, I remind myself. Some people do respect their elders, even these days. Maybe I make them think of their grandpa and they smile at me the way I smile at my grandkids. It is the same sort of thing. Only in reverse. 

Then one of them walks up but she doesn't keep walking. She stops. And she looks down at her phone and then at me and she smiles a different kind of way. Her eyes twinkle because the amber light of the steakhouse reflects in her tears, prismed dramatically and pronounced until they are introduced and run the lengths of her cheeks. She is a beautiful young woman and I understand before I am even told what it was she is to say. 

She says her grandmother was really looking forward to tonight and she really wanted to be here. She tells me a story about how they went to the salon and did her grandmother's nails and hair and how she helped her pick out a dress for the occasion. It was maroon. She doesn't sit down. Her hands are folded in front of her. She says her grandmother is in some catholic hospital in Columbus and they don't know when she will pass, but it will be inevitably soon. I'm sorry, she says. She finishes with that her grandmother made a great effort to tell her to come here to tell me she was sorry. 

I don't move very fast anymore, but while I am in the car I think about how I was once the fastest kid in my class. I was one of the first few picked at football because I was fast and I could catch and throw better than most. We take it all for granted, as I did then. Everything. Speed, birthdays, breath, friendship. But the one thing that never leaves you, I can say with great sincerity, is love. With whatever speed I had left and with whatever strength I possessed, I went with the young woman to the hospital to see her grandmother. 

She was happy I asked her to go with her, she said in the car. She felt it might raise her grandmother's spirits to see an old friend. I looked out the window and caught blurs of speeding light out in the darkness that passed in comet-like flashes like the years of my life. Gone forever when they are gone, like those people who were swept left, like childhood games of football. I saw stores that were new in places of ones that were gone. I saw empty lots where there were businesses before and buildings and houses where there were once cornfields. I saw my entire life pass me by along that highway. 

How long have you known my grandmother? Where did you meet? I didn't know how to answer her so I just said I knew her for a long, long time. 

The hopsital is a scary place when you're 89, let me tell you. I was frightened to go in, even as a visitor. I shook the way a stray dog shakes being coaxed into the dog pound. The older you are, the less chances you have of ever leaving. But I went in as quickly as I could, the young woman holding my arm to politely escort me to her grandmother's room. 

It was dimly-lit and there were machines doing their jobs and nurses taking vitals and scurrying about, looking at me ominously, or so I imagined. A lot of beeps and raspy breaths of technology to keep the living living. To stave off death for as long as possible. Her eyes were closed. But there she was. In the flesh. Her granddaughter said she would leave us alone. She said she had to run to pick up a kid somewhere but she could come back in an hour or so and take me home. If that would be alright. I told her it would be okay. 

I sat in a chair by her grandmother's bedside and had the audacity to hold her hand. Then I had the audacity to speak to her and to tell her some of the things I had intended to say at dinner. I made a list. I pulled it out of my pocket and read through it. I don't know what she heard with her eyes closed. She didn't respond to me the way she sometimes didn't respond to me for weeks in our messages. She seemed to just lay there and listen, so I talked. And I talked. And I felt a connection to someone that I suppose, at 89, I will never again feel. 

So I told her. Everything. 

I never wanted to know who took that picture of you because I didn't want to lose the inspiration, the dream of you. Someone else would have interfered with not my adoration, but with the hope of you. The one day. This day. And I never asked you out for the past 47 years because I hoped you'd ask me, and I was afraid you would say no, and if I asked it would have been awkward and you would not be there anymore and that was a risk too great to chance. I always wanted to ask you. Dreamed of it so often. More than you'll ever know. 

She opened her eyes and smiled looking over at me. Then faintly, with an exhausted effort, she whispered, "At last." Her eyes, even in the very twilight of her life, twinkled just the way they did in all the pictures and nothing in the world brought me more satisfaction than that. And she closed her eyes and said nothing else as I held on to her hand. 

It was only a few minutes later that the machines began to whiz and whir and panick and scream and fail to do what they were designed to do. I heard last their futile cries and footsteps racing down the hallway. Then I heard no more. As I slumped down in the chair, the light leaving me, I must have smiled like I smiled at those kids on the beach who were seeing the ocean for the very first time. It was my time to see the ocean. 

I held her hand all the while, they would probably say, when life took from me all it had left to take, no more than minutes apart from her passing. Maybe I hoped I would go along with her. We caught the same train and it's all in black-and-white, like an old movie. Where we are to go from here is not to be known until it is, and it is not to be related to the living because waiting is still a grace, and love is measured in graces.