Where Do I Go From Here?

“No more running. It’s you and me, that’s the way it’s going to be, and pretty soon you’ll see it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be.” Jack Wagner of General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful fame wrote and sang those lyrics in The Wedding March, a 2016 Hallmark Channel movie. The storyline of the film reunites college sweethearts, twenty years after they parted, when a venue owned by Jack’s character is booked for his ex-girlfriend’s wedding to another man. Each has a teenaged daughter who helps engineer them back together. Do things like that happen in real life? If someone said to me, “Pretty soon you’ll see it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be,” I’d worry that he’s a psychopath who’s going to lock me up naked and cold in an underground bunker. On the Lifetime Movie Network or in a James Patterson thriller that would be a logical next step.

But for a widow like me who has a predisposition toward melancholia during the month of April, hearing “...it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be” so near my husband’s birthday was a queue to turn me into Sarah Sadness. This is all there’ll ever be. Yup, my time has passed. There’s no do-over to make me feel loved and needed again, no lost love out there to rekindle. That’s not exactly true. I had several serious romances before I met my husband but---jeez, I’ve evolved since my twenties and I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams ever being attracted to same people I was back then. And that, dear readers, is why movie plots like that in The Wedding March brings out the cynic in me. Thomas Wolfe got it right when he wrote, “You can’t go home again.” Did you know that title, that phrase was suggested to Wolfe by the widow of another writer? Ah, yes, another bit of useless trivia to clutter up our brains.

Since Mr. Wolfe used that iconic title it's become a metaphor or shorthand for stating that once we’ve moved forward into the more sophisticated world of adulthood with all its ups and downs, heartaches and headaches, joys and disappointments any attempt to relive our youthful memories will always fall flat and fail. Nothing ever stays the same and we all have to acknowledge that with a blending of sentimentality and longing or loathing---depending on what the world has brought into our lives or we left behind before our coming of age.

In Wolfe’s book is a passage that speaks to me as strong-but-aging woman and widow: “The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, ‘Well, where do I go from here?’”

Where do I go from here? What widow has not asked that question of herself? What widow gets a clear road map in her head that answers that question? And when do we quit asking ‘where do I go from here?’ Thomas Wolfe had some wise words that could help: “Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.” 

Not freezing up is the secret, isn’t it. Even if we have missteps after losing a spouse like me spending a year volunteering at small town museum only to learn it wasn’t a good fit for me. Even if I spent an entire summer looking at condos only to learn I’m not ready to pluck myself up from the known and plop myself down into the unknown. Even if I’m in a perpetual state of unrest. I may not know where I’m going but I’m moving forward, didn’t freeze up. I try a little of this, a little of that and I take away a better understanding of myself and the world around me. And sometimes in my search I leave behind a trail of crumbs in the dust in case I want to back-track to something that intrigues me more than another…like my copy of You Can’t Go Home Again. This is the fifth time I’ve written about Wolfe’s can’t-go-home adage in the five years I’ve been keeping this widow’s blog. This is the fifth April since I met Don in 1970 that we don’t get to celebrate our birthdays together. I don’t know what all this means in the grand scheme of things but if the past can be used to predict the future it’s a safe bet that I’ll be quoting Thomas again same time, next year.  ©

Books, Illusions and Change

Recently I got it into my head that I should start reading (or in some cases re-reading) the classics. I started with Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. Weighing just a few ounces under two pounds I was shocked when it dawned on me I’m getting too old to read books like that. War and Peace? Forget it! Ya, ya, I know I could have ordered the Kindle versions, but I wanted to be able to underline passages that I knew would be elegantly written and worth going back to from time and time. And e-readers don’t feel as good in your hands. My poor, aging hands! Have I mentioned lately how much I hate seeing my once perfect fingers start mutating and conforming to the wanton will of arthritis? I’m not a vain person but when I see my three crooked fingers and the blue veins on the backs of my hands, so characteristic of the elderly, I can’t help but be annoyed by how we get time-stamped as we age. 

In this 1940 Wolfe novel he wrote: “The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air---these things will never change.”  I read that and then I got lost trying to figure out what the heck does a “cricketing stitch of midday” mean. A Google search can usually help me figure out what my own brain can’t crack, but with ‘cricketing stitch’ I came back from the hunt more confused than when I started. Does it have to do with the game of cricket or the sounds of insects or something else? I wish I’d been born with a silver spoon in one hand and an Oxford dictionary in the other! Or better yet, be born with a brain that doesn’t give a wild fig in the forest about figuring out the mystery of words. Maybe in 1940 ‘cricketing stitch’ was a common term that got lost in time like ‘rottenlogging’ and ‘canoodling’ which, by the way, pretty much mean the same thing.

The meaning of words and how they change over time always brings me to my favorite quote of all time. It’s from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It comes half way through the book when three of the characters are discussing the fourth chapter of Genesis and how the differences in the way a single word was translated effected the various directions religion took. "'Don’t you see’, he [Lee] cried. ‘The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in the ‘thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel---‘Thou mayest’---that give a choice. It may be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’”

Another book that should go on my quest to read/reread the classics is anything written by Virginia Woolf. Can you believe a self-described feminist like me is even admitting that I’ve never read her? But to quote screenwriter and director, Quentin Tarantino, “Every writer should have a little voice inside of you saying, tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.” So between this revelation and the one about me hating my aging hands, I’ve revealed my quota of secrets for today. I have more hidden under the carpeting which is probably why I’m afraid to get hardwood floors installed. Yes, now I’m just getting downright silly. 

Back to books: I’ll also admit that I’ve never even read Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (That title, by the way, he supposedly got off a public bathroom mirror, scrawled in soap and it wouldn’t leave his mind. Reportedly it's meant to be a metaphor for being afraid to live a life without false illusions.) I do know the answer to that title if taken literally. I'm afraid to read Virginia Woolf which is why I haven’t done so. I should care about her place in the history of womankind, but I just don't. I just care that we gotten as far as we've come. That title taken metaphorically, however---well, aren’t we all afraid of living without our false illusions? If illusions were teddy bears, I'd squeeze the stuffing out of mine and their button eyes would fall off.

And that brings me to a quote of Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendships can we create the illusion for the moment that we are not alone.” I think widows, especially, hear a ring of truth in that statement. When the illusions comes down and we have to reinvent ourselves without our life partners we flounder at first, then we start taking baby steps toward accepting our aloneness (not to be confused with loneliness). Aloneness in time becomes like pair of comfortable old shoes. People might even tell us we need new shoes, that we’re not meant to be alone. Even Mother Nature tells us that---sorry Orson---and that’s when a good book comes in handy. The characters come alive and while we’re reading that book we’re invested in their pursuit of whatever will make them happy. And as they search we learn things about ourselves. We learn that we create our own stories and if we want anything to change, we are the only ones who can make that happen---illusions to the contrary, or not. ©

Do Elderly Widows Think too Much?

A fellow blogger, Judy over at Onward and Upward, wrote a piece titled Yearning.  She longs to move her mobile home to a place on a farm that’s been in her family for six generations and where she, herself had lived for 21 years of her life. It’s a beautiful dream but it got me to thinking about daydreams and yearnings and if fulfilling these kinds of Thomas Wolf (You Can’t go Home Again) dreams would even make us happy. As I wrote in her comment section, part of longing to move back to a particular place involves moving back to the people and times that made the place so special and that part really isn't possible. The people are gone and we're no longer those young, full-of-life and hope individuals we were when we lived there.  For me, that place is the cottage of my youth, the place where all my best memories of growing up reside. Spending hours on and in the water, walks to the store several miles away for ice cream, building forts in the woods, horseback riding and Saturday night movies in an open field with families lounging on blankets---I had an idyllic childhood where it was easy to tell the bad guys from the good guys by the color of their hats.

Don’t you think most of us have a place like that in our minds, a place we can go that gives us comfort? We let our dreams and yearnings drift back in time to when our days were uncomplicated and not tainted by the realities of life. Though unfortunately in the real world there are some individuals who grew up way too fast and never had that idyllic time in life. I’ve known kids who were sexually and mentally abused who never knew unconditional parental love that so many of us growing up took for granted. One of those kids committed suicide in his twenties, several of his siblings grew up to live the life that was modeled for them. They were saplings twisted in the winds of sickness and that sickness begot more sickness.

Years ago I read something about how people survived the brutalities of prison camps and the one thing that still stands out in my mind today was the claim that people with long, happy childhoods were more resistant when it came to recovering after their imprisonment than those who didn’t. Why? Because while they were imprisoned they knew there was a better life for them somewhere, someday and they had daydreams of happier days to fall back on. They had hope whereas the people who had bad childhoods full of pain and abuse had no default place in their brains where they could get a respite from the harshness of their day-to-day existence.  Ever since then I’ve come to view day-dreaming of places and times past as sort of an adult pacifier. We go in our heads to places that give us peace.  And as I get older I wonder if maybe that’s where Alzheimer’s people go in their heads only they just forget to come back. Ya, I know that’s a simplistic way to look at a terrible disease. Alzheimer’s is about the degeneration of brain cells or neurons, but it gives me comfort to be simplistic when thinking about that boogieman place that scares the heck out of all of us as we age.

Back to Judy and her yearning, I also told her in the comment section that I think sometimes it's better that we don't get the object of yearning because then the dream can remain perfect and continue to be a place of refuge that we can go in our minds when we need the comfort it provides for us. If we truly were able to move back to our ancestral homes so late in life, for example, the reality would come with problems and changes we might not like, then we'd have no place of comfort to think back on when we need it the most. Have you guessed by now that I’m the queen of justifying anything that must be accepted as impractical or out of the question?

Aside from his classic You Can’t go Home Again title that has been quoted thousands of times since Thomas Wolfe wrote the book in 1940, he also penned these words: “This is man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: 'I have lived upon this earth and known glory!'" Ten golden moments. I’ve never made a list of my ten golden moments but that sounds like a great project. It would give me ten glorious places for my mind to wonder if I’m ever confined to one of those dreaded nursing homes. I could make up ten queue cards for my nieces to use for when they visit---no one ever called me a woman without a plan---and if I appear as if I’m in another world maybe by using the cards they can bring me back long enough for me to tell them I love them or to quote the country song Kathy Mattea made populate about an elderly couple. The woman in the song had lost her memory but late one night just before she passed away her husband came to visit and amazingly she said: "Where've you been? I’ve looked for you forever and a day. Where've you been?”  ©

Going Home Again - The Cottage

 

In his 1940 novel, You Can’t Go Back Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote: “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Since Mr. Wolfe wrote that iconic title---You Can’t Go Home Again---it's become a kind of metaphor or shorthand for stating that once we’ve moved forward into the more sophisticated world of adulthood with all its ups and downs, heartaches and headaches, joys and disappointments any attempt to relive our youthful memories will always fall flat and fail. Nothing ever stays the same and we all have to acknowledge that with a blending of sentimentality and longing or loathing---depending on what the world has brought into our lives...or we left behind before our coming of age.

But Thomas Wolfe didn’t know about the Power of the Key. When my niece bought the cottage where I spend all my summers growing up and where my parents later retired she presented my brother and me with keys tied with red satin ribbons that matched much of the decor` within the two bedroom cottage. It was her way of saying we would always be welcome to stop by, even if no one was at home. She was out of state this past weekend so that’s exactly what I did and it was just what I needed to help heal the mild depression I’ve been feeling these past few weeks. You might not be able to go back home again, but a visit sure can be fun and uplifting. (My childhood play pal happened to be at the lake, too, and we had a great visit.)

Below is a photo-essay of some of the things I like best about the cottage. My niece kept much of the old and added more “old” to the cottage’s bones to give it that planned vintage look. She painted walls to lighten it up but kept my mother’ beloved red kitchen cabinets that my dad built.  The flooring is all new but the only meat-and-potatoes kind of change she made was a much needed bathroom remodel. Oh, and she added a screen porch that I couldn't photograph because the furnishings out there had been pulled back in case of rain. It's one of my favorite areas, though. I always feel like I’m sitting into a copy of Cottage Living Magazine when I'm out there. ©

This desk was in my bedroom growing up. It has the same green antiquing on it that I did in the 70s.

The bed at one end of the old porch. I spent many nights sleeping there.

On the opposite wall from the green desk above.

 

One of my mother's rockers. If she was sitting, she was usually rocking.

I did the antiquing on the rocker in the 70s. It's held up well!

The tin plate and cup my brother and I used as kids.

The corner shelf above the kitchen sink that my dad made for cups and the cookie jar.

On the left windowsill in the kitchen.

On the right windowsill in the kitchen.

The shelves on the old porch line the wall opposite the bed and were built by my dad.
The set of books are the ones my brother and I read when it was raining outside.

The back splash in the new bathroom. Wainscoting and the cottage go hand and hand .

The cottage has a name, now, too, in honor of my dad.

Mom and Dad in the early 1940s.

The key that unlocks the perfect blending of the past and present.