Sometimes, especially during these long days of Covid 19, I try to piece together why I am the person I am, for good or bad. In this episode I explore the milestones of a life restarted. I hesitate because this one is close to home but here goes:
I am not sure when it started but throughout high school, I began writing the number 36.6 on notebooks, papers or anything else. It became my scribble. Almost like a monogram although I never thought of it as such. I would write it down and then create paisley-like shapes within and around it to disguise the number. I have no idea why 36.6 or where it came from.
I felt that it had significance and eventually began to believe it was the age at which I would die. During our teen years and much longer for many of us, the Romantic notion of dying young is morbidly appealing. The Romantic poets were famous for early bucket kicking: John Keats at 25, Percy Bysshe Shelly at 29, George Gordon Lord Byron at 36. I had notions of writing brilliant poetry and then lying in state as a tragically handsome corpse.
Here’s the rub. I was not writing anything except what was required for school and being a dead waste of space had no appeal. Still, the number hung out there like a sheet music full stop.
Time, however, passes whether we like it or not. My twenties came and went with all the dramatic changes that go with them.
In the summer of my 36th year, June, to be precise, the life I knew officially ended.
I walked out of a courtroom with legal separation papers in my hand and could barely find my car. You have seen the aerial photos of houses after a tornado. There is just a rough circle of fragments around where a house seems to have exploded. Rebuilding a life is not like building a new house. It is more like sifting through the fragments and trying to fit them together like an ill-made jigsaw puzzle. There are items that must be found and kept. There are areas that have completely vanished and walls that have to be constructed just to keep out the rain.
In the sixth month of my 36th year, I began my second life.
I moved into a small apartment at Ocean Drive Beach to begin healing my emotional wounds and to condition myself to my new reality. After six months of self-imposed exile, I moved back to Fort Mill and into a one-bedroom apartment. My back door opened to the Springs Complex soccer fields and I spent a great deal of my time walking off stress. I called every school district around to find one with an English opening. Chester High School called back and I was offered a job teaching College Prep and Honors English. I jumped at the chance. Idleness has often been my tendency but never my friend. I have spent far too much time learning this lesson.
With a regular schedule and a basic means of income, I reveled in being able to spend time with Case and Kate again. There was little money for take-out food and so I developed “Daddy Spaghetti.” I was, and am, no cook so I had to learn to make meals that were edible and appealed to the kids. Part of my strategy was to give fun names to mundane meals.
Kate, Case and I would roam the areas around the baseball fields at the Complex to search for arrowheads. The area was rich in the small artifacts and we took the time to wander and talk. Even today, I am reminded of those days every time I ride by the Complex or hold an ancient arrowpoint.
At the time I felt estranged from many friends. Not their fault; I am an introvert and have a difficult time calling up friends to socialize. I was not ready to begin a new relationship and so I kept anyone I dated at arm’s length. My style was also cramped by the lack of funds. It is hard to entice a first date to come by for a delicious plate of Daddy Spaghetti.
The first real relationship of my new life was Gus. I am not a cat person but Gus was insistent. She was a sleek gray cat who began coming into my house whenever I opened the door. For a time I believed that the cat was confused and thought she was somewhere else but I finally gave in and put out a saucer of milk. Evidently that was the right move. Without a formal declaration of ownership, I had a cat and she had a person. We would sit together at night and watch tv or she would listen to me feel sorry for myself.
A second interest moved in a couple of months later. While I was teaching at Chester High School, the Apple Computer was still in its infancy. There was only one in the entire school and no one was brave enough to take it out of the box. I finally announced that since no one claimed it, I was taking it to my classroom.
I made good on the threat and opened the various cardboard cartons. I read the directions and assembled the hardware of the Apple II-e. With all the plugs plugged, I switched on the machine on and there was an empty green screen. Once I found out how to load programs, I set out on a journey that the rest of the world was also beginning. It was a heady time to be a geek.
Through an Apple school loan program I bought my own Apple II GS, a quantum leap in computing at the time. The II GS had color, graphics, word processing with actual fonts, and even games. It occupied an area in the small den of my apartment and filled hours of empty time. With Gus and the Apple II GS, I felt my life was becoming complete.
I knew what was missing but did not want to take any rash steps toward opening any of my still raw wounds. I wrote self-absorbed dreary poetry and was invited by another teacher at Chester to visit a poetry class at Winthrop College*.
(There should be dramatic music here, like the organ in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Music that tells the listener that something different and dangerous is about to enter the picture.)
After being introduced to the professor, I took a seat in the class next to a graduate student whom, it turned out, I had already met. One of the Ervin girls was my first thought. Grady and Betty Ervin were famous for their dark-haired beautiful daughters. I remembered Cheryl from the time twelve years before when she was Tessie in the high school production of The Lottery which I helped direct. The intervening years had certainly been kind to Cheryl.
The room was suddenly electric. We paid less attention to the class than we should have and passed bits of our poetry under the table to each other. We both knew that there would be more time spent together.
This was not a whirlwind courtship, it was a vortex that pulled us both in before we were ready. Cheryl became a regular consumer of Daddy Spaghetti and even took me out to eat occasionally.
Cheryl also solved a mystery that had puzzled me for some time. Gus, named for “Gus,” the theater cat in T. S. Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats, would come and go as she pleased and was often outside when I went to bed. Several times, in the middle of the night, the doorbell would ring. When I answered the door however, there was no one there and Gus would come trotting in. After several times, I began to believe that Gus was ringing the doorbell. While it seemed implausible, there was no other conclusion I could draw.
One evening Cheryl came by after an evening out with her girlfriends and as she drove up, she saw Gus jump up several times and slap a paw against the doorbell button. I still have no idea how the cat made the connection between the button and my opening the door but there were tell-tale scratches on the door frame around doorbell.
Gus was not a fan of Cheryl. The cat would position itself between us on the couch and occasionally slap aggressively at Cheryl. It was as if Gus had come along for a purpose…to keep me company when I really needed it. As Cheryl and I grew closer, Gus would visit less and less often until, one day, she left and didn’t return. Sometimes I believe there are guardians who come along when we need them and stay until we don’t. I am ever grateful for the time Gus chose to spend with me.
Cheryl decided to stay. I am pretty happy about that too.
*Now Winthrop University
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