She came into my life without warning, she left my life without warning, and she has returned to my life without warning. She is the great mystery of these years, she is id to my superego, she is action to my introspection, she is self-reliance to my permanent invalidation, she is at once the acme to zenith of responsibility where I am irresponsible, yet where I seem to be responsible, she to be honest was not to be in a way that nearly destroyed me. She is whom I'm just beginning to truly know, whom I prayed would return, and whom I pray we can somehow find a way through the chaos to work with each other as a team for many years to come.
I will not say her name in public, but she was born here in Baltimore, the daughter of a Bronx Jew and a Delaware WASP. When she was born, her father was fifty-three, his mother eighty-seven. Her Bubbie, like mine, lived to her centenary, before Baltimore, the Bronx, before the Bronx, pre-Israel Palestine, before Palestine, Turkey, before Turkey, the Pale of Settlement. Walking miles every day of her life unto the very end. Her son, from the Bronx complete with the accent and abrupt manner of so many New York Jews of those years, three daughters, and two wives, one properly Jewish, the other the product of a marriage he undertook to get out from under the thumb of the same Jewish community he found constricting as I did. A cyclist like me, an architect who founded 'architects row' in Baltimore - a row of townhouses near Spring Valley in East Baltimore where lived many of the architects of Baltimore, the city's modern designers who did what little they could to stem the irreversible tide of urban decline. He was, in his time, which began in 1927 and stretched to his seventy-sixth year, extremely involved in civil rights, and like so many New York intellectuals of that generation, perhaps even in New York's burgeoning folk music scene.
Her mother, now beginning her octogenarian years, and especially fascinating; born on a farm in Michigan, where her idealistic and highly educated father, progressive for his time, lived to milk goats and make cheese, before he moved to Delaware to become an engineer for Dupont, but hailing from a generation when American progressivism was associated as much with the right as the left, an era when socialism could be nationalized, and by accounts I've heard a racist with a particular antipathy for the peoplehood she married into. Perhaps it's not surprising his most idealistic period was spent in the state for whom Henry Ford was the most famous resident, but let's be honest, his attitudes were hardly atypical for his time, and we're hardly through with them.
The mother was the apple of her parents eye, perhaps even the favorite - talented and beautiful while her siblings sounded more ordinary, and extra money was spent developing her talents, much to her siblings chagrin. When she left the nest, perhaps not a moment too soon from what's described, it was as a trained ballet dancer, ready to take on New York, but then as ever, New York is not taken on, it takes on, and the mother's experience in New York was just as difficult as the father's if not more, and she ended up in Baltimore, smart enough to get a PhD but scared of the workforce as anxious people are, and a third marriage which ensured she didn't have to work much.
Their marriage seemed in some senses foreordained, father and mother neighbors who were both transplants, both divorced, and already family friends who knew and were liked by the children and the exes. Their marriage was not without its complications, including a seven year separation when my belle was just a baby, with the father living just down the street to help take care of her, then reuniting in her seventh year, but always living down the street from each other in separate townhouses.
My belle was born to an eccentric, unique family, so different from my own, but just as loving, and just as neurotic, as my own family. She and I apparently played in the same orchestras, went to the same camps and concerts, read the same books. All four of our parents highly intelligent people, but my parents priorities were almost entirely Jewish, and certain wings were necessarily clipped to fit my parents priorities, for which as I get older I understand that they obviously had their reasons for believing and doing as they have. She was brought up a relative bohemian by intellectuals who'd chose the nest of their backgrounds as my parents didn't. They had their reasons too.
The belle of my ball went to the Baltimore School for the Arts, and then never went to college but rather became a landscaper who nursed a habit of reading on the side, every neighborhood in Baltimore seems to have a house and yard she worked on. Shortly after her father passed on from cancer, she moved to northern California to be near her half-sister, where she stayed for nine years, and had two children by an ex, considerably older than she just as her father was considerably older than her mother. They had 'a business' as it were that was entirely typical for California and not entirely legal, but when the business went under and they lost the house, a house which could soon be lost to fire as so much of rural California is, my belle realized she needed a more stable environment to raise her sons, and returned to Baltimore where she and her mother raise two highly precocious and energetic boys, the father living in the county and taking them part of the weekends, which is when we see each other. For now at least, until COVID strikes again. Yesterday was the very first time I met her clan, I'm told I made a great impression, an impression I can only hope will remain great but I of course have my trepidations.
I have no idea what is in store for us, it fills me with equal excitement and terror, and can promise nothing. I have so little to offer but my brain, so different from other people's, with both its skills and its troubles. She has hardly seen me at my worst yet, and I have given her more than forewarning of its horrors, but nobody knows what it's like to see a person in the grips of insanity knows what it's like until it's there. I hope that in a few years with increased success and confidence I can get certain things under control as I never could before, and in the meantime we will take it somewhat slowly as we must. All I know is that from the moment we first met, I valued her company as I have valued no one else's in the short yet very long history of my life. Her natural instinct is for whirlwind romance, attraction like magnet to metal, and my instinct is always as I do, to worry that whirlwind depletes shelf-lives, increases instability, and every beautiful experience meets its reactive ugliness. And yet it is so long, so long...., since I have thrown any caution to the wind in any aspect of my life, the wall of my caution and worry is so thick that only alcohol, which I've basically given up, and a gorgeous creature of the moment like her, could ever find its way through it. She is the embodiment of the hope which the universe whatever its creator may be, seems to have thrown me, and in these two brief periods has given my life a beautiful meaning it never has ever had in any other moment. I hope, I pray, for its stability, through whatever turbulence and terror makes itself known. All close relationships, of whatever type, are a boat through waters stormy and calm, the storms will come as surely as the beautiful views, and to whatever possibility of predestination is out there, may we please be blessed with your good grace and better angels.
Amen.
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