I've heard the cliche that time heals all wounds. Does it? Or does it change us as we adjust to whatever brought on the grief? I suppose the amount of time that has passed has a bearing on the extent to which we feel loss. I still remember gaffes I made as a soccer goalie 34 years ago. Strikeouts in baseball. Missed basketball opportunities. So time hasn't healed those, but I suspect I'm in the minority with respect to such issues. I react in a worse fashion to more profound events.
Nearly a year has passed since my friend Dave died. Hard to believe, but I'm a busy guy, which tends to make time appear to go more quickly. I don't think there ever was a time when I didn't see him for a year over the preceding three decades. There were stretches, as there naturally are in all relationships, during which we didn't see each other frequently. Lives take different trajectories at different times. Like when I was married and he wasn't, though he was around often then. Then he was married and I wasn't. Then I was married with kids, and he didn't have any, though he loved mine. When we didn't see one another or converse often, I took comfort in knowing he was out there. I've said it before, but I like knowing grizzly bears are out there, too, though I don't need to see them every day. So Dave's death left a void I can't fill and has affected me more deeply than I anticipated. I tend to have somewhat delayed reactions to trauma, and as time has passed, I've become more, not less, saddened.
My younger son has an affinity for a primitive dirt road along a lake in a wildlife-management area where we sometimes fish. I swing my SUV through the deep ruts, and the kids bounce off the back seat and nearly bang their heads on the roof of the truck. Dave and I fished there in our teens and more recently with my son. We once got the anchor stuck in that lake, and I had to jump out of the canoe, into the murky depths, to loosen it. He refused, which I considered ungracious, since I supplied the canoe and the anchor.
The dirt road borders a cornfield, and my son asked as we bounced along not too long ago how high corn grows. So I, naturally, broke into song, telling him the corn at a minimum grows as high as an elephant's eye. Asian or African elephant, I don't know. Female or male, don't know. Baby or mature, don't know. But I recalled the song from my elementary-school years, and my classmates and I performed it during a show.
Oh what a beautiful morning,
Oh what a beautiful day.
I have a wonderful feeling
Everything's going my way.
All the cattle are standing like statues,
All the cattle are standing like statues,
The corn is as high as an elephant's eye,
And it looks like it's climbing
Clear up to the sky.
I've since considered that song and wondered who wrote it and what the fuck they could have been thinking. A beautiful morning and a wonderful feeling everything's going his way? In what life? I seemed to recall that the song came from "Oklahoma," where the wind goes sweeping down the plains. So I looked it up, and, yes, it is from "Oklahoma." I remember the lyrics to the title song, too. Apparently "Oh What a Beautiful Mornin' " is the opening number in the Rodgers and Hammerstein play. Published in 1943. During WWII, no less. I guess the nation needed a pick-me-up. Here's Hugh Jackman singing it, joining such luminaries as Sinatra in belting out that classic. And it appears I slightly misremembered the sequence of the lyrics. I may have been remembering them in the sequence I would have used had I written that song. Perhaps I'd be better off if I didn't remember this kind of stuff at all. Or maybe I should wake up to that song each morning. Or go to bed with it playing on my iPod. Maybe I can reprogram my brain and buy into the system.
Anyway, the anniversary of Dave's death approaches, and his birthday, and I'm no more at peace with it as the day he died. Onward we go, down that bumpy dirt road.
