once upon a time
In the early nineties, Robert Olen Butler wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection called A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
. I read it for a Fiction Writing course I took while working on my MA in English. My favorite story was “Fairy Tale,” mostly because of the first paragraph:
Yesterday was the anniversary of when I climbed upon a time: Ginger and I had our first date on February 5, 1989. I was living in Fort Worth and she in Arlington. I had tickets to go see a new singer, Lyle Lovett, who was performing at Caravan of Dreams in downtown Fort Worth. I had planned to take my best friend, Billy, but after I met Ginger I called and told him I would get him something else – I had met a girl. In 1989, February 5 fell on a Sunday night as well. Since I was working in a church that had a Sunday night service, my original plan was to cut out during the last hymn, shoot over to Arlington and pick her up, and then come back for the show. An ice and snowstorm hit and church was called off, so I called her and made plans to pick her up for dinner. I slid across town in my front wheel drive Toyota Tercel and we ate at Good Eats, a kind of comfort food place, and then went on to see Lyle.
The show was amazing. He had a cello player with him and they moved from country to alternative to blues to improvisational jazz seamlessly. The room was intimate and charged. As we reflected on the evening later, we both had a sense of awe and mystery that night.
We climbed upon a time and have been riding ever since.
The next day I sent her a card, using Lyle’s words:
I don’t think we ever have. In April we will have been married sixteen years. Together we have moved across country, made our home here in New England. She has stayed with me through my seemingly endless vocational crisis and the ride down the wormhole that is Living With Depression. I was there as she got her doctorate, among other things. The ride has had its moments when we felt as if we had been thrown. But the best parts have been the meals and the movies, the walks on the beach or around our old Charlestown neighborhood, the memories we keep packing into our hearts.
I searched hard to find a Good Eats Café of some sort in the Boston area, but all I found was a cheap college pizza joint, so I opted for familiar food. We went to Bob’s Southern Bistro, based on reviews I found, and stumbled into another memory together. They were having a Super Bowl party (that’s what Feb. 5 meant to everyone else). When we got there, they were handing out shots of Crown Royal; after dinner they gave us homemade carrot cake. In between, we chased down fried catfish and chicken, some meatloaf, and all kinds of good southern side dishes.
And we told anyone who would listen why we were celebrating.
One of the last lyrics I wrote when I was writing songs is one that never made it to any sort of recording, but remains one of my favorites. It’s called “Well Worn Love.” The image I had was of Ginger and I after forty or fifty years. I kept playing with the image of a love well-worn, like the library steps worn from good use.
Sometimes Ginger asks me where I think I would be if we had never met. My answer is always the same: “I don’t think I would be alive.” I am upon a time, rather than crushed below it, because Love found me when I looked in her eyes some seventeen years ago.
However bumpy the ride has been, Love has never let go.
Peace,
Milton
