I spent this past weekend at the beach. I love being near the ocean. I like walking near water. I think differently when I’m near the water. It was a nice, but all too short, getaway. I snapped a decent picture on Sunday morning before the beach was crowded – when the only people on the beach were dog walkers, a few runners, and folks like me who wanted to stare out into the wide open spaces away from the people and crowds.
This is about the time of year my family used to make our annual trip to the beach. The last time we did that was in 2018. Now, the different factions go to different beaches. They’re all kind enough to invite me, but it’s hard for me to get extended time away from the office, and also hard to get a dog sitter. Nevertheless, there were a few times over the weekend when I wanted at least one or two more days (it usually takes a day or two just to settle in and forget about work or the traffic or the daily grind).
On the subject of traffic, and given the post I wrote the other day, I had a slight chuckle while driving home. I was on route 676 – a high volume road with lots of on ramps and exits that cuts across/under Philadelphia. On 676, someone is always riding your ass or cutting you off or not letting you switch lanes to exit – basically, it’s some of the worst of typical city traffic. I used to drive this road everyday in the evening rush hour to my girlfriend’s place. Quite often I would arrive a little frazzled or angry because the guy in the white BMW did x inconsiderate thing and the woman in the blue SUV did y inconsiderate thing… and don’t they know that the world is all about me and they’re in my way? Driving 676 on Sunday and not being allowed to merge on to the highway at first made me angry, and then made me wonder how I dealt with that nonsense everyday, and then made me laugh because I could remember letting it get to me back then. What a stupid thing to carry with you into whatever the next moment is (grabbing a drink, meeting a friend, settling in). So many times that girlfriend would ask, how was the drive, and I seldom had anything nice to say about it. I appreciated the concern, but I can see how it could have been a drag of a conversation every time. I could laugh about it this past Sunday because it wasn’t part of my everyday and, because the same thing still pisses me off – I still have some work to do… I told myself this is a dumb thing to get aggravated over – it was a dumb thing to get aggravated over back then too… smile while cutting carrots (or while dealing with other drivers).
But this isn’t a post about traffic on 676 or about the serene ebb and flow of the tides and early morning quiet of the beach – though maybe it’s influenced by the vast timelessness of the ocean. After getting home and taking care of the dog, I decided to get some groceries and wine and make a nice shrimp and pasta dish. I put on a playlist called “ethereal” which is mostly songs with a melancholy or chill vibe (“Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Lifeline,” “Nothing As It Seems,” “Static,” “Take Me With You,” etc.) I don’t expect you to know any of those songs, except the Beatles one. They’re worth a listen if you want to feel that mix of sentimentality and depth that sometimes masquerades as love, or longing, or familiarity. One of the songs, Ben Harper’s cover of “The Drugs Don’t Work,” seems to be about saying goodby to someone who is dying (I’m assuming a dear friend or partner with a terminal illness) and how they’ll meet again. The chorus is:
Now the drugs don’t work
They just make you worse
But I know I’ll see your face again.
Listening to this, I tried to think about those types of promises… can we really keep them? And if not, can we be expected to say anything different in the sorrow of the moment? I tried to imagine how that conversation might play out years after the narrator/singer has moved on – it’s a poem I’m working on. Maybe one night in the fall, after dinner and some wine, two people in love begin talking about growing old. While neither of them believe in the afterlife, that’s where their conversation turns – who do you expect to be see again? Whose hand will you be holding? The person asking (the narrator) is expecting a certain answer – why does he need, seek, or expect that type of reassurance? The person answering flinches, remembers her promise, isn’t sure and is uncomfortable with necessarily leaving one of these two people alone, uncomfortable with disappointing someone she loves or loved. Is she automatically reunited with that person whose face she swore she’d see again? Or is that person doomed to sit waiting in eternity only to find out she found someone new? Are we monogamous in the afterlife? If so, it seems like someone is going to be left out somewhere.
If I remember, this was part of the premise of the show “The Good Place” in which everyone in “the good place” gets matched with their soulmate – and it’s usually a complete stranger. That makes the thought more palatable – to have no say in the matter and hopefully no recollection of these “false soulmates” we know here on earth. Of course, in the poem, I don’t think it it will play out that way. We’re complicated creatures who feel things like longing and guilt, insecurity and shame. One person admits that they think it might be this other person from their past (their first love, or perhaps like the song, someone who passed away too soon). I’m trying to figure out if that dooms their future or just ruins the evening. Is it the type of thing that, now that it’s been introduced, will eat away at them? I mean how does one recover from that type of knowledge – an infidelity of the soul? And what a silly (and dangerous) mental game to play in the first place.
Yet we do this all the time, though maybe not on such extreme levels. We often look for reassurances that “we’re the one.” We check in to see if “you’re still with me?” This has a tendency to put a lot of pressure on our relationships. Despite knowing the statistics about divorce rates, we, at least here in the US, have this notion of “forever” with vows like “’till death do us part.” And then, if the songs and poets are to be believed, we expect to meet up again in the afterlife. We want to be loved so deeply, that one life together will not suffice. I suspect, most of us are painfully aware of how difficult “forever” is. I wonder if the challenge is part of the allure, part of the beauty of it – two kids, crazy in love, beating the odds. Isn’t that the theme of almost every Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp or Chris Stapleton song? “Jack and Diane” have a “Fast Car” – they were “Born to Run” and are “Starting Over.” The truth is, we love the triumphal arcs of our lives and loves because it gives us hope…. because walking alone in our white robes, head down, kicking some cloud of a stone in the afterlife seems somehow less than what we had imagined. Just the other day I came across a short poem, “getting there,” that summed this sentiment up nicely:
the mind says:
this river has no bottom
the heart says:
we can build a bridge here
I love the foolish optimism of that.
But what do we do when the foolish optimism fades, or forever begins to seem like a real drag or a punishment, or we find a new forever? I spent a weekend at the shore where in the early morning I watched the tide recede. I picked at shells and stones, some broken, some worn smooth. It’s hard not to feel a little small in front of those depths and distances – that sense of long-time and erosion. I always feel a bittersweet tug when I’m in the Philly area – a place where I built and burned more than one forever.
Things got pretty heady as I drank my Pinot and listened to my “ethereal” play list. I am, like most of us (I hope), a romantic at heart (and a realist in my head). I happen to like the big and small triumphs of the heart. I like its moxie in wanting to build bridges across bottomless rivers. I like its foolish determination and insatiable appetites, its unbridled enthusiams that will always be temporary. Most of all, I like its ability, often through its own ebbs and flows and eddies, to reveal to us our own depths of truth, visions of beauty, small stones of promise, and seashells of hope.