Ring-A-Ding-Ding

    Max watched Mary nearly every day. He watched her go to work in the morning and leave work in the late afternoon. Sometimes he watched her go to lunch and come back, though she didn’t always leave for lunch. Usually, she lunched out only on Fridays. Payday Fridays, he assumed, she treated herself. He didn’t know her name so he called her Mary. It somehow seemed to fit and it was enough. He had never spoken to her and he probably never would, he knew in those abysmal early years. Their situation was hopeless because he watched her from a three by four foot barred window in his cell at Winslow State Prison where he was serving a life sentence for murder. She worked at the Job and Family Services building across the street. She parked in the same parking space everyday and through a half dozen trees he watched her come and go. He knew every outfit she wore to work and thought he could tell her mood by the outfit she wore. He knew every pair of shoes she had. Every purse.

    It began with Max Sherman sitting at a table in the county courthouse. There were paintings of men who used to be judges on the wall staring at him. They all had grim, serious faces. They were all dead but lived on in the oil of those menacing portraits. The courtroom was a sarcophagus that seemed to be made entirely of mahogany, all but for the cheap carpet. It smelled of it, too. It made it difficult to breathe. There was a chance the case would be dismissed because the prosecutor had done something highly improper, which Max did not understand. The defense attorney who told him seemed to hardly understand it himself. Having no money and desire to hire his own attorney, Max’s defense counsel was a appointed by the state – a legal aid fresh out of college – a wide-eyed wiry kid about Max’s age who zealously claimed to believe in Max’s innocence. He came into the courtroom after being coughed out of the judge’s chambers along with the prosecutor. The judge soon followed, frowning, muttering to himself. The defense attorney bit his bottom lip and told Max the grim news, as though hearing it from him would make it somehow more bearable. The judge refused to throw the conviction out and sentencing would proceed as scheduled.

    There was no jury in the jury box. The chairs where they sat a week before now sat empty. He looked at the one where the most attractive of the jurors sat – a young woman who he thought was sympathetic to his defense. However, as the verdict indicated, she turned out to be not as sympathetic as he hoped. There was something about her though, and during the trial he could not help but to stare at her. She often looked back at him and once or twice, despite the circumstances and the grisly testimony, she even smiled. In another world, he thought, maybe they could have been together. Their unspoken love affair lasted as long as the trial did but then it was no more. He wondered if she felt as he did, that they were torn apart by fate, though it was the fate of the trial that brought them together. During the last day of trial when the jury returned with their verdict, she appeared dejected and forlorn and did not make eye contact with him at all. When they were dismissed she quickly left the room as though she were ill. 

    But now she was gone and there was something miserable about her empty chair so he looked out the window where there was a birch tree and in the birch tree there was a bird – an oriole. He watched the oriole as the judge spoke. He watched the oriole as the judge told him to rise and asked if he had anything to say. This was allocution. Max chose not to speak. There was nothing to say. He had already proclaimed his innocence.
 
    “In the matter of Maximilian John Sherman, case 93CR2877, who has been found guilty of Aggravated Murder, a felony of the first degree by a jury of his peers, I do hereby impose the maximum sentence of life in prison without parole to be served in the state penitentiary as deemed fit by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. I hereby remand you, Mr. Sherman, to the State Department of Corrections for evaluation and subsequent incarceration in the appropriate state facility. Good luck, young man. May God have mercy upon your soul. Bailiff.” The judge spoke as cold and sternly as those paintings looked. One day he too would be on the wall around the time that Max was finishing his sentence. He would be up for parole in 25 years. Max was whisked away to begin his life. No longer a man. Now property of the state.

    “All you have to do is appeal!” his attorney insisted. “We will win on appeal. It’s in the bank!”

    But Max did not file an appeal. The years passed in prison. Men choose either to break or they find a way not to break. Some take a lover. Some need only a friend. Some preoccupy themselves with the torture of their imprisonment and become jaded and tormented souls that, although very much physically alive, are equally emotionally dead, and seem only to haunt wherever they go. Some become devout Christians or Muslims or they immerse themselves in physical fitness. Some obsess in frivolities or become chess masters or gamblers or voyeurs of a God-like TV. It all depends on who you are and what kind of time you got to do. Max watched Mary come and go to work. He bought a pair of binoculars from Slick Rick who sold practically anything anyone would want or need in prison. Dirty magazines. Sex toys. Weed. Whisky. Slick could get anyone anything for a price. How he did it, no one exactly knew. We all assumed he had a few guards in his pocket. Maybe he cut them in. So when Max asked for a pair of binoculars, Slick thought nothing of it. He asked Max what he needed them for, out of curiosity, and Max said he was a birdwatcher. Slick laughed. It was not a lie. It was a hobby he had since he was a kid. I knew it because Max was my friend. To everyone else he was a murderer, an inmate, a number. He killed his wife for insurance money, they said.

    He may have started bird-watching, but his focus turned to Mary soon thereafter. He wouldn’t tell anyone why, but he was at that window at 7:40 every single weekday morning, again at lunch, then again at 4:30 until she went home. This was every single day for twenty seven years, hoping she didn’t get a new job, or move away, or retire early, just to catch a glimpse of her. For twenty seven years he told me all there was to know about her. All that he could know. What car she drove. When she was pregnant. How many kids she had. When she colored or cut her hair. When she wore a wedding ring and ten or so years later, when she took it off. Never an indecent or lascivious word about her. He was never unhappy in telling of her children or her marriage, nor did he seem overly pleased when she was apparently divorced. He just spoke of it like it was something of interest, like someone might have mentioned seeing a speckled warbler or a rare yellow titmouse. He said very little of her otherwise, but I knew when he lied in his bunk or when we played cards on occasion that he thought of her. It was enough to drive a man insane, I would have thought. But it is what kept Max sane for all those years. I think had she changed jobs or moved, he wouldn’t have made it. I think he would have broke.
    
    I came and went from prison four times over those 27 years for 7, 2, 5 and 3 year bits. I left and when I came back, he was at that window. Over and over. Every time. I had never asked Max about his wife or her murder. But one night when he was twenty some years in and I was in on my 3 year bit for a parole violation, I got a bottle of cognac off Slick Rick to celebrate my kid’s graduation and we sat up that night and got drunk in our cell. I suppose it was the alcohol that made me ask, and the alcohol that made him answer, but we talked about his wife. Max was 22 when she was murdered. They had been married for only two years.

    “I came home from work, had a good state job at the Department of Natural Resources as a Park Ranger, fresh out of college, and she was in bed. It was five or so. I just let her lay there. Thought she might be sick or just exhausted from fighting the night before. She was up all night crying. She was still crying that morning when I left for work. Praying. But I saw her under the covers from the bedroom door. I saw her bare foot sticking out of the sheets. She was on her side, facing the wall. I just – let her sleep.”

    “Did you do it?”

    He looked at me and there was emptiness in his eyes. Disappointment in me for asking, I think. “We’d been fighting the night before, I mean – physically fighting – so I just let her sleep. She found out I was having an affair with a girl I worked with and she attacked me. She had every right to. I had just got benefits at work and added a life insurance policy for us both. Both for 500,000 – what they’d say in court was an unusually large and suspect amount. We had only been married for two years and already I was having an affair. I was ashamed and depressed. Around seven or so I finally went in to wake her up and to tell her I was sorry, that’s when I saw what had happened.  What she had done. She slit her own throat shortly before I got home. Blood all over the bed and – the look on her face – I can’t forget it. She was staring at the wall, big empty eyes. Tears stained her face. I grabbed the knife like it could hurt her still. Just to get it away from her. I threw it across the room. But she was already dead. I called the police not thinking how it would look. That was not my concern. They arrested me and charged me an hour later. I’ve been in jail ever since.”

    “Didn’t you tell them what happened?”

    “No, Grady. I didn’t say anything to anyone. You’re the first person I told what actually happened. Between the life insurance, the affair, the fight the night before and me picking up the knife and leaving my prints on it, it wouldn’t have mattered. She had also scratched me the night before and my skin was under her fingernails, they said. But the real reason I didn’t say anything, other than pleading not guilty, was because she was Catholic. If it had been ruled a suicide she wouldn’t have been buried in her family’s cemetery. That would have crushed her mother. It was better for her to think I had killed her. Plus, she had three little sisters and that insurance money, which went to her mother by default, would pay to put them all through college. I suppose, by now, I should say it did. Had they found out that she had killed herself, there would have been no insurance money.”

    “Why did you marry her?”

    “She was pregnant when we got married. But she lost the baby along the way. Things were just never the same after that.”

    I couldn’t understand. The more I asked, the more confused I got. “Didn’t you plead not guilty?”

    “Yes. But I didn’t offer a defense. I told my defense attorney that I came home and found her that way, as it was, but I didn’t say anything more. I never told anyone I did it, but I never told anyone that I didn’t outside of entering the not guilty plea. I never said how it actually happened. I think for all these years I have felt so guilty about what I had done that I felt guilty for what she did. It was my doing. It was as though I had murdered her. We are sometimes so careless with other people. My attorney said I would win on appeal, some procedural issue, but I didn’t file. This is what I deserve.”

    “Goddamn.”

    “I remember her telling me this story, Grady. It was of a saint. She often told me stories of saints and they are all sad and tragic. This was about Saint Dymphna. She was the daughter of a petty Irish king – of Oriel or someplace. Some tribe or clan. Anyway, her mother died and her father was so grief-stricken that he went insane. Eventually he was pressured by his councilors to remarry, but he said he would only marry someone as beautiful as his dead wife. So he searched but found no one who compared. Then he saw his daughter who was just fifteen and perverse in his madness made it known he would marry her for she resembled her mother, his dead wife. But young Dymphna fled the country with some servants and ended up in Belgium, or somewhere, and used what money she had to serve the poor. Her father found her after they traced the money and he came to reclaim her to be his bride. But she refused to go back to Ireland to marry him and he struck her dead with his sword. She was canonized and became Saint Dymphna. She is the patron saint of mental illness and anxiety. The one you pray to when you are afflicted with such. I thought it just as likely that Dymphna killed herself rather than to marry her father, but had she, she wouldn’t have been a saint. She would have been forgotten. I didn’t want my wife to be forgotten.”

    We drank what was left in the bottle and slept most of the next day. I knew he was telling the truth. For some people alcohol is a truth serum. And I’ve hustled all my life so I know when I’m being bullshitted as opposed to when I am not. I’d make a fine judge, I often laugh thinking of it. Me, the accused, and a bottle of cognac. Max was different than the rest of us. Those of us hustling in prison. Trying to make the time pass. Trying to get one over on the next guy or the guards. Lying to our wives or girlfriends on the payphones so they put money on our books and don’t fuck the neighbor while we are away. Praying for release, but not for our victim. Hoping some other woman who ain’t worth a damn waits for us. Hoping our kids remember our face. All Max cared about were birds, that woman in the Job and Family Service building, and his dead wife, whose penance he paid with 27 years of his life.   

    Max was forty nine when he was given parole. I asked the guard who was at his parole hearing if he claimed innocence, though I knew he didn’t. No, he told me, he expressed how sorry he was for what happened and how he wasn’t the same man. I still had a year left on my 3 year bit when he packed his things to leave. I was happy for him, but knew I’d miss him. My time would come. Twenty seven years he had served for a murder he hadn’t committed. He would tell you he deserved it for being careless with someone, but the rest of us would say he was crazy as hell, that prison life got to him, canonized him. He was the Patron Saint of Prisoners, if you ask me. He came back from that parole hearing looking no different than when he went. Neither happy nor displeased. It was as though he had lost the ability to have either emotion. He seemed to not be comprised of any emotions and to have no transmission to shift him from one to the other if he had. He seemed like a man forever stuck in emotional neutral. It was as though he had lost the pettiness of it all somewhere along the way. As though it faded from him and he had been absolved of the great burden that we all are born with and bear.

    He left those binoculars on his mat. I asked him before he left if he intended to go and speak to Mary to ask her out on a date, but he said he wouldn’t do that. Why, I asked. “Because she would never look at me like the man I would want her to see me as. It was never about her anyway,” he admitted to me. “It was about me. How I looked at her, longed for her, dreamed of having a normal life to be with her. Those were my dreams. My emotions. Not hers. Hope is like gasoline in that way. But the people we meet in life are only reflections of ourselves. They have their own dreams and emotions. And they have only the power with which we imbue them. If I invest in her hope that she will want to be with me, despite me serving 27 years for murdering my wife, and she rationally does not want to be with me, I have given her an undue power over me. That, I will not do.”

    I asked him to stay in touch. I asked him where he would go. But he didn’t promise me he would, nor did he tell me where he was going. I imagine he intended on disappearing somewhere. Satisfying his parole and finding a window through which to watch life. All I had of him was his name and about a dozen scattered years of memories, specifically one drunken June night when he confessed his innocence.

    As luck would have it, I was released six months later. Six months sooner than I expected. Six months sooner than my wife expected. I caught her in bed with a neighbor. At first, it bothered me and I felt the tinge of rage in my blood that could easily have resulted in murder and my own life sentence. But I thought about what Max said of the power we give and don’t give others and I simply exhaled and picked up my bags and left. Something about Max rubbed off on me, it seemed. Something changed in me and what my wife did hardly mattered at all. The petty shit I did on the streets to lose so many years of my life seemed absurd. 

    I didn’t have a place to stay so I ended up going to Job and Family Services hoping for some temporary shelter and assistance until I could get a job and a roof over my head and maybe one of those government phones. I wasn’t going back to prison. I was let into a door and down a hallway and through a maze of cubicles until I got to a room where an empty ergonomical chair sat waiting for me to sit in it. It had designed holes all through it. It must have cost the government a fortune to put those kinds of chairs in a building as big as this, I thought. There was an equally empty chair behind a desk across from where I was to sit. There were pictures on the desk which I only saw the backsides of, which I presumed were happy family pictures. Babies taking first steps. Christmas morning. A honeymoon on a beach somewhere. That sort of thing. I had all my possessions in the world beside me. Two duffel bags of clothes and a pair of binoculars.  

    While I waited, I looked out the window and could see the monstrosity of the prison where I spent the better part of two decades for stupid things. It was an ugly building from the outside, but I sat there and thought of how unfamiliar it looked from this view. I felt like I escaped rather than was released for some reason. But there were trees out the window and birds and I thought of Max. It was a wonder how little I thought of birds before I knew him. I barely even noticed them, but anymore I am in the old birdwatcher society myself. I thought of going to the library after here and getting a book about birds so I know what I am looking at. I was sure that I would. Then she walked in. 

    I knew her instantly from all the times I had prodded and poked Max about his lady. She was his lady. Mary. Only her name wasn’t Mary. She reached her hand across the table before she sat down and smiled at me. “Hello, I am Gloria Finch.”

    I laughed. She must have thought I was drunk or on drugs. Gloria Finch. Of all names. It was just like God. It was His wonderful sense of humor. Those bizarre quirky things we sometimes call coincidence or whatnot because we know no other way to explain them better. This was God pissing on my face. “Gloria Finch,” I repeated astounded as I shook her hand.

    “Is something wrong?”

    “No. Not at all.” I could have not said a word. I could have handed her my application for assistance and she could have told me she would file it and I would hear something within so many days and that would have been the end of it. Love stories end that easy, before they ever even begin sometimes. But I felt compelled to tell her. I had to explain the humor of her name and I thought that maybe she would appreciate it. She was a beautiful woman. Mid-to-late forties. Years that she wore well. She took care of herself and it showed. She had a natural beauty that just wouldn’t fade away, that adapted to age. I could see what Max saw in her. She possessed an elegance and ethereal quality the way movie stars once did before they became tits and ass. She could have been Rita Hayworth. I didn’t have to get any further than saying his name before she stopped me.

    “Max Sherman?”

    “Yeah. You probably remember that he killed his wife but let me – ”

    “I do remember,” she exclaimed. Her eyes stared directly at me as though she were mystified by what was to be a simple anecdote. Then she looked down and seemed to lose herself for a minute, like someone about to have a stroke. Like someone had winded her. “I was on the jury. I was juror number nine. And no – I don’t think he killed his wife. I believe she killed herself. I always have.”

    “But wait you – ”

    “Yes. I voted to convict him. I’ve been ashamed of myself ever since. I wrote him a dozen times asking him to forgive me, but – he never replied. Eventually, I stopped writing. I figured he hated me, but the other jurors were such assholes and I was pressured – I can’t explain it to you.”

    “How did you know he didn’t do it?”

    “A feeling, I guess. Some of the evidence didn’t quite make sense to me. But the other jurors became prosecutors in the jury room. They convinced me that I must be wrong. That they had it right and I was wrong. I was so young and unsure of myself. And when he didn’t take the stand to say what happened. He just sat there. How did you know he didn’t do it?”

     “He told me. I got him drunk one night years back and he said it – as it happened.”

    “And he has been watching me? I told him I worked here. That I would try to get him a retrial and a new attorney and that I would do anything I could. I begged him to file an appeal. God, I didn’t want to sound like one of those sappy pathetic women writing to a cold-blooded murderer, but I knew he didn’t do it. I just knew. I should have trusted my heart and not my gut, but I thought I was smitten. I don’t know.”

    “He had a pair of binoculars, you know. These binoculars.” I handed them to her and she held them as though they were a priceless artifact, looking down upon them with obvious regard. “These are what he watched you through. Every morning. Every evening. Fridays for lunch when you went out to eat. I always wondered what he was thinking. But you ought to know that you brought him peace. Just to see you.”

    “Well, if that were true why didn’t he write to me or come and see me when he was released?”

    “I think he doesn’t feel you would be able to see him as anything other than a murderer. Or even if you think he is innocent, that it still might play in the back of your mind that he’s not.”

    “Oh, no. No. Where is he now, Mr. Grady?”

    “I don’t exactly know.”

    She rubbed her beautiful face in anguish, yet through the despair of it there was a revival of something that was thought dead. Something that had been dormant. There was a glimmer of hope that remains in all of us long past its rightful expiration date, or long after someone surely thought they killed it, as her ex-husband thought he had.

    “I think I know where he might be, Ms. Finch. He just spent 27 years in prison. He has a mother who lives in Pittsburgh, I recall him saying. Her name is Angela. Same last name. The chances he is there are better than not.”

    “Well, Mr. Grady, what do you say we go to Pittsburgh. It’s an hour away. I’ll buy you lunch and have you home by dinner. Deal?”

    “You had me at lunch. I got nothing better to do.”

    I felt like the ink in a love story, or the binding of a book being written by fate. It was December and cold and it started to snow, but the joyousness of our impetuous jaunt to Pittsburgh for a newly-free man with nothing in the world to lose and everything to gain was quite overwhelming. You are in love with everything when you get released from prison, every little thing. Everything is new again and everything is a gift. It was not my love story, but I was happy to be a character in it. It breathed life into me. Hope. Maybe mine would soon follow, I laughed to myself. Piggyback somehow off theirs. Gloria kept humming a song that sounded familiar to me and I asked her what it was.

    “I don’t know,” she smiled. “At trial, he hummed it. I’ve had it in my head for twenty seven years. The other jurors thought it odd and in poor taste that he hummed a song during trial. Like he was mocking the justice system. But that wasn’t it at all. So I hum it now and then. It just comes to me.”

    We ate lunch outside of Pittsburgh. Gloria used her laptop to help locate Max’s mother’s address. I thought of the story Max told me about Saint Dymphna and tried to tell Gloria on our way to the house, but I couldn’t think of how it went exactly. But she already knew the story. She said she grew up Catholic in Canton, Ohio and in a nearby town named Massillon, in a Catholic church, part of Saint Dymphna’s remains are interred and there is a shrine to her that she had seen once or twice when she was younger. The house was a two story brick Victorian with a porch and stained glass in a very middle-class neighborhood. It was a beautiful home. I tagged along with Gloria as she went to the door and rang the bell.

    “You know,” she confessed to me. “I realize now I could have contacted his parole officer and asked where he was residing. They would obviously know. I just thought of it.”

    “Yeah, but this is more fun, isn’t it?” I grinned.

    She smiled as to agree, then the door cracked open and a sweet old lady stood there smiling at both of us. It was his mother and my hunch was correct that he was living there with her. She invited us in and told us that Max was working at the Byham Theatre in downtown Pittsburgh where he found work doing maintenance. I wanted to ask the old lady if she knew her son was innocent of the crime he had spent 27 years in prison for, but it wasn’t my place. I was not Geraldo Rivera. It wouldn’t surprise me if he hadn’t told his mother so to protect his wife’s secret. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all. She invited us to stay and wait for him to return from work, offering to show us her collection of blown glass bulbs over tea, but we respectfully declined. I could tell that Gloria was hoping she would see his mother again. That there might be a place for her in their home. One thing prison does is helps you read people, for better or worse. And in all the time I spent in, I could have had a doctorate in the field.
    
    Gloria was nervous when we pulled up to the theatre. A beautiful snow fell. Slow and steady flakes that took over everything. She asked if I minded having a drink before we went in and so we did, across the street at a little bar. She had a chocolate martini and I, well, for old time’s sake, had a cognac. “I’m still married, you know,” she confessed. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe I ought to go home. He didn’t reply to my letters. He doesn’t want to talk to me, Mr. Grady. I put him in prison!”

    “Gloria, if you go home now it will never be. You’ll never know.”

    I suppose that was enough because she finished the martini and I finished my cognac and we headed directly over. Beautiful gray skies full of cleansing snow. The street congested with traffic and people walking here and there. I was drunk on my virginal freedom more so than the glass of cognac. The theatre was beautiful but nearly empty. A few people were setting up audio equipment on the well-lit stage which was beneath a beautiful and mesmeric mural of Heaven. Statues of angels on the walls and paintings of clouds, azure skies and angels flying. Someone asked if he could help us and Gloria said she was looking for Max Sherman in a pleasant way and the man smiled exposing a few missing teeth and pointed up to the stage where I could see Max haloed in stage light tapping on a microphone saying, “Test, test.” Gloria saw him too and she took a step then faltered and stood there awkwardly looking at him. I imagine she was lost in what she would say. Stage fright, so to speak. Would she apologize to him or just tell him how she felt? She had probably already said it all over and over in those unrequited letters.

    There was a flier on the wall for a concert. A Beatles tribute concert by a band called The Fab Four. I stood in the background and watched her walk slowly down the aisle. And then he saw her. He didn’t say anything at first, but I could tell he saw her. She stood about halfway between me and the stage and she said, “Hello.”

    “Hello,” he replied into the microphone with a modest smile. But nothing more.

    “I wrote you. Several letters.”

    “I know.”

    “I would like to talk.”

    “You can. I’m here. Not very busy at the moment.”

    “I meant – um. Maybe in private,” she suggested.

    “I don’t think there is anything to be said that cannot be said here.”

    She smiled, appearing defeated. “Well, was there anything there, Max? Is there anything in you for me?”

    He looked at her from the stage like he watched her for all those years from a barred window. He took a moment before he said anything, as though he was measuring his words. “I have lost a lot in 27 years. No fault of anyone’s but my own. I don’t think that I have anything left in me to give to you or anyone else in the way that you probably would wish to receive it. Some things are left better from afar. At a distance. A safe bird-watching distance. To be looked upon rather than had. Dreamed of rather than lived. I am happy you came, though. It is a very kind gesture. It was nice to see you, from a much better view.”

    She smiled a faint attempt to keep her composure but began to cry. She turned to walk away, but I held out my hand from the shadows where I stood and told her to go back like a director giving stage cues to a young actress. I insisted. She bit her lip and looked at her shoes and it was as though she were walking on the moon when she turned and headed back down that aisle. This time all the way to the stage. 

    He remained at the microphone adjusting it unnecessarily. She said something I could not hear. I could only imagine what she said. Something to the effect that she waited 27 years for this moment. That she served no less than he did, in a prison of her own guilt with men she did not love, without a man that she did. That is what she said. I am sure of it. She looked beautiful in the light. It is difficult for a person to keep their beauty across years, especially tormented years that are prone to age you. Men and women in prison often come out looking 20 years older than they are. Men and women who suffer loveless marriages often show the wear of their years like someone with an illness. That illness is no less damaging. The one of a broken yet beating heart. But she was beautiful in her years and he was a handsome man as well, and if two people were more tailored for each other, I do not know them. I like to think she kept him young. Kept his spirit alive when it would have died otherwise in guilt or hopelessness had he not that window and that perfect view of her.

    “Well, before I leave I want to ask you one thing. What was the song you hummed in court,” she asked. He didn’t answer at first. He smiled as though he didn’t recall. She smiled at him sadly then was walking back towards me when he took the microphone and sang it to her. A song he knew so well. It was a beautiful song and to my surprise, Max had a wonderful voice. Or maybe his voice just sounded so wonderful because I was still on honeymoon from prison. She walked back towards the stage as he sang, elated. And when it was over, they kissed.

    The song was called “Somethin’ Stupid” by Frank Sinatra. I know because my dad, despite being a raging alcoholic, was a tremendous fan of Ol’ Blue Eyes. I think he thought he was Frank when he got drunk because he would put on Sinatra records and go in concert and sing for hours. I heard him from my bedroom and I learned all of his songs. Every word. Our living room on Saturday nights was Carnegie Hall. I remember he sang one upbeat song called “Ring-A-Ding-Ding” very well. I think it was his favorite. He never slurred or missed a word of that song. It has always since made me think of falling in love.

    I never said hello to Max. Not then. He couldn’t see me where I was in the theatre. I didn’t want to interfere in their love story. I was just happy to be the ink. I surely didn’t want to remind him of his lost 27 years, if that is all I’d serve to do. I watched them from the back of the theatre for a while as they danced on the stage after the band came on and rehearsed love songs for them and amused in the couple’s delight. It made me smile and gave me hope. The world needs more love stories. We need more love and more hope. There are factories for sorrow made by efficient machines, but love is only grown in gardens, tended by willing hands. I left and caught a bus back home, watching the birds outside of the window most the way. Then a pretty woman in a seat across the aisle from me impetuously remarked about my blue eyes and asked me if I knew that today would have been Frank Sinatra’s 105th birthday. “Ol’ blue eyes,” she grinned. I smiled at her. It was apparently my turn on the stage. 

    Ring-A-Ding-Ding. Ring-A-Ding-Ding. Ring-A-Ding-Ding.