Down The Well: A Lackey of Prudence (Nov. 1988)

This column first ran in November of 1988. A year later, the “family” I wrote of was long gone. Much has happened in the nearly 20 years since then. But somewhere tucked away in a box is an old vinyl briefcase full of letters, more brittle every year….

 

I was writing the date on a check the other day when I thought of her. The figures I had just scribbled onto the paper were the same as her birthday, September 28.

Part of my mind focused on keeping up the light-hearted social banter at the checkout counter. The rest of me went tumbling down a well of memory. It was a time when we were going to save the world. We looked at the lives of our parents and decided we would be different; nobody was going to tie us down, gnaw away at our time with worry about mortgages. We had nicknames for one another that could have come straight out of The Lord of The Rings.

All that was a long time ago. But there is something about a first love, a first marriage, a first divorce. Autumn is a time for looking backward, with the cold coming and flames of the world burning low.

My sudden melancholy had as much to do with me as with the season, with the number of hairs I’ve been finding in my hairbrush the last few years, with my thickening middle and thinning expectations.

The last time I saw her was about this time of year, a wet, sullen time in the weather of the south. We had sat through the divorce hearing holding hands, which perhaps puzzled the gnarled old judge. We drove away, I alone in my car, she and her sister in a huge, lumbering old Chevrolet sedan. I happened to look up into the rear-view mirror just as the behemoth behind swung left at the intersection. That was the last sight I had of her, a silhouette in the smudged window of an old car.

Everyone said we were too young. They were right, but we were in love and who can reason with love? I was 19 and she nearly a year younger when we got married. I was visiting her in Mississippi when we decided to “elope,” with her mother’s blessing. We got married across the river in Arkansas, because the waiting period was shorter and we didn’t need the permission of her father, who was in Vietnam.

The man who performed the ceremony was a justice of the peace and a mechanic. He crawled out from under a car, swept some things off the counter, and did the thing right there, grease and all. At least, that’s how I remember it. I gave him the two dollar fee and he gave it right back. He said he wanted to give us our first wedding present.

We got lots of wedding presents, the one from Ray the JP, and more traditional ones from relatives; appliances, crystal, china. Within the first year we had hocked most of it just to pay bills.

It was like that throughout our entire marriage; just one step ahead of the bill collector. I suppose it’s like that for a lot of people. We never got out of it. Probably a lot of other people never do, either.

I still have an old vinyl briefcase full of the letters we wrote to one another when we were in high school. The letters are what you would expect; gushing, full of that damn-the-torpedoes sort of love of which only the young and the hopelessly inebriated are capable. Even alone, the rest of the house fast asleep, I blush reading them. Or maybe I redden because the dreams failed, as dreams do; the world intrudes, we compromise, we become less-and somehow more-than we had intended.

And then, one day, we awake, middle-aged, worrying about mortgages, drugs and schools, car payments, dental bills. These are all the things that should properly concern me, I know. And yet…

Last summer I went through the letters in the vinyl pouch. I was packing to move, and thought, as I do every time I move, that I’ll throw the old pages full of tortured prose away, every last, heavy-breathing one of them.

“I don’t need them,” I tell myself. “They only take up space.”

Then, I zip the old case back up and find a space, somewhere, in all the other flotsam of my life.

Today, I thought about those letters and how I feel, even now, when I see, like a scratchy old film, that green Chevy, forever and ever turning down that street in the rain. Nostalgic? Only for who I was, and who I thought then that I was going to be.

Do I miss her, in the same sense that I would miss my current family should I lose them? No. We were unhappy together for good reason: as we grew and matured, we grew apart. By the time it was over it was well over.

But one can’t annul the years spent with another person, the way one would erase a recorded tape. In half a dozen years she and I shared a lot of fine moments, and some beguiling dreams.

In his work Jurgen, James Branch Cabell wrote: “At the bottom of my heart I no longer desire perfection. For we that are taxpayers as well as immortal souls must live by politic evasions and formulae and catchwords that fret away our lives as moths waste a garment: we fall insensibly to common sense as to a drug; and it dulls and kills that which in us is fine and rebellious and unreasonable: so that you will find no man of my years with whom living is not a mechanism that gnaws away time unprompted. I am become the creature of use and wont; I am the lackey of prudence and half-measures; and I have put my dreams upon an allowance.”

It has been at least a dozen years since the Chevrolet turned that corner. I do not look backward wishing to be where or who I was then. All told, I was immature, childish, self-centered. Now I am middle-aged, childish and self-centered. Progress comes slowly. I love my family and would kill to stay with them. But I look down at the other end of that long well and I sometimes wish I had more of that: “which in us is fine and rebellious and unreasonable,” because there is still enough vinegar in me to resent being the lackey of prudence.

I heard that she remarried, that she is successful, that she has two kids. That makes me happy: she always wanted children. I hope she is well and happy, I hope that the world is giving her all the things that she needs, and I hope maybe somewhere she has an old briefcase, full of letters she doesn’t need and can’t throw away, a well of time with some spirited and unreasonable faces swimming in its deeper waters.

© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

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