(For: Sharon A. Waagen)
When I look
back, some twenty-eight years, perhaps even thirty-four years when we first
met, when I look back to her and those far-off days, the relationship looked
incidental, but it really wasn’t. I perhaps was the first man—not the first to
make love to her—she was only twenty-three old, finishing up college—but the
first to be an ideal to her.
In every instant, and every letter she
said that, inferred that.
She was so polite.
We might have been to an onlooker, the
politest people they had ever met. A trick of the heart I would think.
I don’t remember much anymore, now
sixty-four years old, ten-years her senior, the echoes of the past (1980s) have
done just that, passed, vanished; vanished jovialities, along with the: binding
and nervous energy, the imposes, harmony—
Perchance we were not really alike—yet
if there was any wisdom she got from me, it is all molded up now in her persona
(in a like manner:
hers to me): now with those masks we face the world, have
faced the world with.
Perhaps my depths back then were too
Irish, romantic, and illogical. Or hers, to Norwegian, romantic and logical;
who’s to say?
She did display an enormous heart, soul,
all crammed into one female shell.
Saying goodbye was always hard for her.
I was aware of her warmth, merely a last unwilling fragment of mine to let go
of, and at the end, she walked away, walked off back to North Dakota
She had an air of seeming to want to
wait, as if for me to get through with something more important than her, a
battle in which I must not be hurried or interfered with. But she had waited
long on this issue already— conceivably too long, I don’t know, but perhaps too
long. Now when I had finished, and she had waited long on this issue, she would
no longer be waiting, no longer with fret or impatience, no longer going
toward, but going away from: she was now in North Dakota, back home.
“Goodbye!” she said under the rays of the
sun one afternoon with my so many doubts; it indicated some fault in our plans…
This time was for real. Although she allowed me to remember always how fond she
was of me, and possibly she had grown, I had.
She was now reorganizing, I assumed—laying
the materials out for her profession. It
had been six-years, a confirmed decision to start life all over.
#918 (6-8-2012)
