"...tonight I'll be out on that hill
'cause I can't stop
I'll be out on that hill
with everything I got
with lives on the line
where dreams are found and lost
I'll be there on time
and I'll pay the cost
for wanting things
that can only be found
in the darkness on the edge of town..."

Bruce Springsteen, "Darkness on the Edge of Town"

I sat up in bed and read and tried to get past it for just a minute, or a part of a minute, but then my mind drifted back to another Friday night, long ago, a Friday night, late September, 1998, a memory from nowhere, a night I hadn't thought of in years, me working part-time, Lauren still working for the insurance company, we had no car, the little old gray Sentra had died the week before, as Lauren drove to work, six months pregnant with the boy we would name Bailey.

"I'm trying to learn understanding
Against the hell I can win
If you'd hold me up
Grow me up
Let me be a part of it
Give me the chance that I see
I could take me up
Raise me up
Get to know the heart of it
Give me your sweet soul dream..."

Sweet Soul Dream, World Party

This past Wednesday, I celebrated, alone, the fourteenth anniversary of the day I married Lauren.

Fourteen years ago on Wednesday, Lord, it seems like another lifetime ago, it seems like something that happened to someone else, in some other life I can only look at and smile at, but no, it really was me and it really was her, it really was me and and it really was my Lauren, we really and truly stood up in front of our friends and families and our world and we swore to love each other and to live together as one until we were, as we said in our vows, "parted by death."

This song, "Sweet Soul Dream", was our wedding song.

...Can't believe you're really gone for good.
I still haunt the places you once stood.
I should move on, but I never could,
Really believe that you were gone for good...

All those years,
disappear,
All my tears,
are not enough, not enough...

I still have your memory.
One or two pictures of you and me.
Life is long and life is tough,
But when you love someone,
Life is not long enough.  

Emmylou Harris, Not Enough

I sit here tonight and I let the memories run roughshod over me: I can remember just where I sat fourteen years ago tonight; I sat in a backyard somewhere in northern England, I sat next to my Lauren, my betrothed, just seven short days away from our wedding day.  

We had gathered with some of her friends for a barbecue and we sat together eating, drinking beer, talking, and laughing as they gently teased us over the way we kept kissing and making eyes at each other. Somewhere in a photo album packed away somewhere in this house lies a picture of the two of us that night, Lauren sat on my lap as I planted a kiss on her forehead.

"So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes,
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care, say, 'Hello in there, hello.'"
....

"Hello In There", John Prine

Here in the final hours of another long weekend spent an eternity away from my long-lost love, an eternity, with me here breathing and her down there, cold and still as the green grass grows slowly over her, I sit down yet again with only the silence of yet another lonely midnight as my company, and I try, despite knowing well the futility of the exercise, to make some sense of it.

"I'm feelin' thankful
for the small things today
I'm feelin' thankful
for the small things today
Happy, happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
and to you..."

"Happy Birthday To Me", Cracker

Me and Lauren always had a thing for carrot cake.

It started all the way back at the beginning, back in April of 1993.

We'd said goodbye to each other that previous December, knowing we wanted to give new-found feelings a chance to bloom, and not knowing how those feelings would stand the strain of living an ocean apart from each other.

She came over to see me that April. Within a couple of days, we admitted that we felt like we knew. Knew that we'd wind up together.

"Children are playing
At the end of the day
Strangers are singing
On our lawn
It's got to be more
Than flesh and bone
All that you've loved
Is all you own

In a land there's a town
And in that town there's
A house
And in that house
There's a woman
And in that woman
There's a heart I love
I'm gonna take it
With me when I go..."

Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan, "Take It With Me"

My three and a half year old daughter woke me up at three forty five last night, crying out: daddy, daddy, daddy.

I went to her, for the third time that night. Tired and bruised and feeling somehow defeated at having had my sleep broken yet again.

Fix my blankets, please, daddy. Fix my blankets.

OK, I said. I straightened out her blankets and rubbed her tummy for a minute and said to her, you need to get some sleep if you want to have fun tomorrow, don't you want to have fun tomorrow?

Yeah, she said. I wanna have fun tomorrow. I'll go to sleep.

And she did.

"Well all of the hard days are gone,
It's all beer and whiskey and songs from now on,
Laugh at the darkness and dance until dawn,
All of the hard days are gone.

We're all safe and warm here, my friends,
All the bad times are over, they won't come again,
Raise up your voices and give us a song!
All of the hard days are gone.

Well, life has been cloudy and gray,
Take the bad memories and put them away,
The sun has come out, we've waited so long,
All of the hard days are gone..."

"All of the Hard Days Are Gone" The Mckrells

I had it planned out, all those months ago, way before the bottom fell out of our beautiful life.

Me and Lauren loved to go to a good party, but we loved throwing a good one even more; and in quiet moments now and then a loved one will pull me aside and tell me they dreamt of her, and oftentimes, they tell me that dreamt of her, and of all of us, at a party, and way back in the late summer days of last September, I had a party in mind, our biggest one ever:

The 2008 Derby Party.

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"this old man i've talked about
broke his own heart
poured it in the ground
big red tree grew up and out
throws up its leaves
spins 'round and 'round
i know all this and more
so take your hat off
when you're talking to me
and be there when i feed the tree..."

Belly, "Feed The Tree" from the album Star

Well of course I can't sleep, on this, another lonely Friday night...I sit here with some fine beers and some tunes we listened to back in 1993, such as the one above...and I try to write the sorrow out, like it's something I could wring out of a wet shirt...as if I could type it away...Lord knows I have tried...I try to type something that might do justice to my Lauren, to today, to how I sat on the banks of the Geyser Creek watching two of our children playing with three of my sister’s children, watching them all happy and momentarily oblivious to the crushing reality the grownups around them cannot run from...

"I spoke about wings
you just flew
I wondered, I guessed, and I tried
You just knew
I sighed
But you swooned
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon..."

The Waterboys, "The Whole of the Moon", from the album This Is The Sea http://www.youtube.com/...

I spoke to one of my two sisters tonight, beer in one hand and the phone in the other, and where would I be without her, where would I be without my sisters and my brother and my family and my friends, where would I be in these lowest of hours, in the depths of the first few lost and broken months since we lost our beloved Lauren, since we lost the love of my life, my wife, the mother of our three children.

"We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh-oh Thunder Road oh Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it's late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road sit tight take hold
Thunder Road..."

"Thunder Road", Bruce Springsteen

downloading Bruce by the bucket-full tonight...
and writing emails left, right, and center...
connecting and re-connecting,
to those who sit by idling,
waiting with their own aching hearts,
for some reason to think i might start thinking
i might start driving myself somewhere else...

"...don't be sad,
i know you will
but don't give up until
true love will find you in the end
this is a promise with a catch
only if you're looking can it find you
'cause true love is searching, too
but how can it recognize you
unless you step out into the light, the light..."

Daniel Johnston, "True Love Will Find You In The End"

Listen To This Song Here

True love indeed found me, looking or not, a bit over fifteen years ago, and then, on November 20, 2007, it left me behind forever, on that awful day when two surgeons sat across from me and told me that we had reached the end of the road: they could do no more to save her, leaving me with nothing more to do but to sit by the bedside of my true love, to sit with her and hold her hand as she laid on her deathbed, with nothing more to do but to desperately utter words of eternal devotion that I can only hope she in some way heard as she passed from this world.

Reading up on the latest financial disasters tonight, my mind drifts back to the very end of the twentieth century, to the year 1999.

Life, as they say, was good.

Me and Lauren had entered the fifth year of a gorgeous marriage and we'd just brought a child into the world, our first, a boy, born on December 23rd, 1998. We had bought what they call a "two-family" home that July; up and down flats, three bedrooms in each unit, a nice place. We got $650 a month in rent from the tenants downstairs and I think the mortgage on the place was $900 a month.

i never saw her coming.

twenty five years old and looking not much more than half of that, and i knew, just knew, i had some sort of magnificent future laid out in front of me somewhere, i just had to walk into it: i felt certain that i would, just didn't know when.

so i waited.  

"build a new house
down by the sea
get to the place
we were meant to be
when the rainbow comes
we'll be living on all sides
when the rainbow comes..."

"when the rainbow comes", world party, from the album goodbye jumbo

i always did the grocery shopping, it's just the way our own peculiar division of household labor worked. made sense, since i did all of the cooking. hard for me to cook now, more than three months in to our life without her; yes, i cooked for the kids and i cooked for family and friends, sometimes, but most of all, i cooked for her.

"don't you be using every minute
on making a living
because we got our love...
don't you be out all night long
leaving me all alone
because i, i need your love..."

duffy, "syrup and honey"

stumbled across the song while wandering aimlessly through the tubes the other day...every once in a while i get obsessed with a song and i just got obsessed with this one...difficult to figure why certain combinations of notes, melodies, and harmonies rock our own particular worlds so hard, a mystery, i guess, but a little mystery works wonders sometimes and as long as we can still feel that something, as long as a song can still move us to tears or at least to a place where we sit still and think about our lives, we don't ever need to worry about answering the question of why it happens.  

can anyone recall
the saddest love of all
the one that lets you fall
with nothin' to hold...

Paul Westerberg, "Love Untold", from the album Eventually

Tonight, looking through the music collection for something I haven't heard in awhile, I came across Eventually and decide to give it a whirl. Eleven and a half years ago, no, it can't be, yeah, it is that long, late July 1996, just a week or so after our second anniversary, me, Lauren, Dan and Michele pile into Michele's orange Neon, the car that met its end when a deer wandered out into its path out on the Taconic State Parkway a coupla years later on the day Michele made the move from Albany to NYC. Eleven and a half years ago, and who could of dreamed the horrific end that would await my love, who could have dreamed that tonight I'd sit here alone, grieving my beloved Lauren, who could have dreamed that she would have left us all behind so soon, at just thirty eight years old.

i rose at 5:30, as usual...and as usual, i laid alone in our bed in the dark and the quiet,
our three children still fast asleep, and as usual i wept over my wife's death, more than
eight weeks gone now...
i wept a bit harder this morning, because tomorrow would have been her thirty-ninth birthday...
and as usual,
after about an hour i got up out of bed and turned the coffee
on, then the computer...i read an email from my sister, in which she reminded me that
our beloved nana had walked down this same road over half a century ago,
as a thirty four year woman with five children in 1940's upstate new york...