To Love Long

53 years, 218 days, and 18,000,000 arguments into this matrimonial collaboration and we’re content. She is as full of shit and vinegar as her mother was at this age and I can’t help but feel that the hair growing out of my ears needs a good styling. But don’t be fooled by appearances. This isn’t the pastoral porch-dweller’s fantasy Polaroid. No, it only looks like we sit silent and side-by-side each day, watching the too-fast world stutter by like a flip book. We aren’t full of bitter nostalgia.

I remember the day she lost the car downtown and walked home in high heels. “Cell phone died” and that uncompromising glare that demands adoring love. We rode our dusty bikes up and down those streets all night and cursed like sailors. But she found that car, and I thought I ought to buy a shiny rock to put on her finger. She still wears it, though she says it doesn’t really mean anything since we’re both too old to cheat on each other. I wonder if I was the best for her.

These days we are drowning in reminders of our metastasizing obsolescence. She is beautiful and indignant with six feet (two of which are green and fuzzy) shuffling across the kitchen floor. Mahogany does not take the sting out of relying on a stick for short walks, and when we received that letter from the state announcing our eligibility for the cool, blue parking spaces, you could have sworn we’d won the lottery. She sure as hell kissed me as though we had. But that can’t offset our growing patronage of “early bird…” and abuse of senior citizen discounts. Don’t let anyone feed you that bullshit about growing old gracefully. Get the porterhouse instead.

We are often besieged by children of our children and they have helped to keep us young. She looks 25 again when she plays with the youngest, and that yawing, crooked smile brings the taste of cold beer and the smell of lilac trees to me. We are charged with teaching them the quaint, but apparently essential functions the world has forgotten. These include lessons on losing, getting hurt badly, misbehaving and fessing up, and the reasons not to swear. If we find time and our gears are sufficiently lubricated, we take pleasure in a well-tied fishing line and perfectly-baked bread. Our grand-progeny appear to enjoy our company, and we know that soon they will become mired in lives of their own.

So what do we have left of our own beautiful lives? I cannot speak for her, but I’ve got the smug satisfaction of knowing that I picked the right one. Even wrinkled, dusty, and frail she is devilish in her wit and indulgent of my persistent forgetfulness. Long love is something I seem to have lucked into. But if I have any advice for those who would aspire to these depths of longevity, medical complications, and inglorious bodily functions, it is not profound.

Please, and I say “please” deliberately, do not look so far into the future. It will be there waiting for you. That beautiful soul you caress into monogamy is an evolving organism. It is changing so rapidly that you may not even notice. But one day you will wake up during your “old age” and find that the newest incarnation of your soul mate seems a bit less familiar than it once was. If you have done most things right, that being will appear to be a brand new version of you…or them. It’s getting so hard to tell these days.