I'm not one of those Holy Rollers who preach the gospel of growing older as Glory Years. The Golden Age? Sorry, it's not. More like the Rust Belt. Of course, it has its very real pleasures, however these pleasures are fewer - your imagination might wander but your body stays put - and the penalties greater. I've taken falls in my lifetime with barely a bruise that would have pulverized me had I taken one this morning. Still, have all the fun you can because, why not? It's been a long and rambunctious ride, and I see no reason to quit.
One of the beauties of a long life is that people come back into it. There are times when you know someone so well you might even die for them. You make room for them in all the minutes of your life, hold them there, hang out, listen to music as if you've been together forever - and then they disappear. It's not abrupt. If this were a movie they would slow fade to black. Decades pass, so they are remembered, if at all, as wisps that dissolve soon after they appear, memories as intense as they are frail.
Lara is one of those people. I first saw her on an early Spring morning thirty years ago. I was standing on the small bridge that spans the creek in front of our house. I don't know what made me turn around - maybe it was a bicycle bell? - but there she was, couldn't have been more than eleven, speeding by on a battered boy's bike, long blonde hair streaming behind her, a wisp of forsythia her headband. I can't remember how we began talking or how Jamie joined us, but the day came when Lara knocked on our door for the first time. She with her mother and her mother's boyfriend had moved into the cabin on the edge of our property that had earlier been a one room schoolhouse. I thought of "A Midsummer's Night Dream" when I first saw them, phosphorescence cavorting in the forest, slender and fetching the way (if you had a strong stomach) Keene paintings were in the sixties, in their own dimension, victims of the city, refugees from daily life. We live way up a small, beautifully isolated valley in the midst of the Catskill State Forest. By coming here they chose Thoreau over Warhol. They had both been on the cusp of that world. Lara's mother, Nancy - cropped blonde hair, a damsel fly on moss - had sung back-up on the 70's spoof hit, "Monster Mash." Her father, (now dead) danced in West Side Story. I don't know what Oliver did. He looked like a jockey, but I've never been sure. The first time I went down there to say hello, he was sitting in the crotch of a maple tree maybe ten feet up, elf-like, and he never did come down. Later on I learned he fantasized being a hobbit. He actually came up here to be a Hobbit! Lara, on the other hand, wanted nothing more in life than to get back to New York City. She'd been born and bred to the rhythms of the streets, and that's where she wanted to be. Jamie and I, a tenth of a mile east, were the next best thing.
She knocked and told us her mother wasn't feeling well, could she come in? The first of many more knocks, the beginning of a relationship neither Jamie nor I had intended nor were we prepared with how deeply we would come to feel for this child, and she for us. Had we invited it? Had I? Had Lara herself put things in motion and kept them there, albeit unconsciously? Basically, she barged into our hearts, and we reciprocated: kite flying, cookie making, walks with Hank, our springer spaniel, snacks, meals, sleepovers, a fishing trip on the Chesapeake Bay with my niece and nephew...Best of all, Lara favored the bubble baths. There was no water and no tub in the cabin - they drew water from the creek out front - so Lara craved hot, soapy baths more than food or anything else. Anticipation made her giddy, giggly, really silly. She was spending more time at our place than her own. Eventually, it came out that her mother had been very sick and had gotten sicker. Would I please go down there with her?
As long as we'd lived here, I'd never been inside that cabin. Edie Falco and her dog lived there before she was Edie Falco. No running water. No electricity. Compost toilet behind a wooden screen. I was prepared for shtoonk alley, so it was a nice surprise to find it neat and clean and...Minimalist. Any sparser, it would have been empty. Nancy lay on a mattress. The mattress was on the floor. Normally thin, she looked cadaverous, a drastic change from the times I had seen her outside. She whispered she'd contracted girardia from the water in West Kill Creek, but she knew how to treat it. Had she been to a doctor? "I've got what I need," she said patting a box of herbs in plastic containers. "How can I help?" "Lara loves being with you. It makes her happy," she answered.
I told Jamie, "That's not girardia." I'd begun to recognize that gaunt look. It was the mid-80's. AIDS was rampant - the distinctive skeletal faces of its victims. "J, it's AIDS," I said, "Nancy's got AIDS." It didn't take a month. We checked Nancy into Belleview on a floor where every patient was a young man with the face of the young man next to him. Nancy's face. "What am I doing here?", she asked, but, soon, she would return to California with her mother, an aging flower child, and die of it. We stood there at her hospital bed - Nancy so weak, almost inert - the skin on her face, stretched thin, opaque - with Lara, Oliver, and Nancy's mother, knowing that the dreaded question was coming, and it did, "Will you adopt Lara?" Will you take this child as your own who loves you and whom you love? We could not. Time and circumstance were just not right. We had no children, yet, although caring for Lara helped ready us for the ones we have. She sucker punched me. I wasn't prepared for such an abundance of feeling, never even knew it was there. What I felt and feel for Jamie was and is no less intense, but it's not the love for a child, is it? It was agonizing to say no, but we could not say yes. When memory replays this scene, as it does from time to time, I feel just as I did standing at Nancy's sick bed saying, "No", to Lara. Awful. What had happened to her? Where had she gone? What had she become? Was she still alive? When she thinks of me does she loathe my memory?
Cut. Dissolve. Two months ago.
I think I was in the living room. Maybe my office? Jamie comes in with her notebook on facetime and says, "Somebody wants to talk to you." "Tell 'em I'll call back." "You want this," she said, thrusting the notebook forward. Who is it? Some woman. Mid-forties. You want me? No clue. Until I hear her say, "Hi, Stephen," and wave and smile. Jesus! Lara? Lara! Retired Army. Successful marriage. Two kids. Drama teacher. Grown woman. A good life. Lara had never forgotten us, and now she had come back into our lives. She sought us out. She wants to visit. She's remembers how we were back then, how much we cared for her, how much she cared in return. The love we felt was deep and it was real. Her heart was still full of us. Yet, those were troubled days. We just couldn't protect her anymore, but, now, here she is again: strong, loving, capable, ready.
I'm trying to remember what Lara likes to eat, for when she visits. Jamie aims to buy bubble bath, just for the hell of it.
The perk of a long life.
Next!
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