Maple Drive: Love Is a Garden
Part 9 of 9. How I fell in love with my wife 33 years ago. The story of the the nurse who married the waiter and the waiter who married the nurse. The happiest two months of my life.
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With this post, I come to the end of the 365 series, the set of essays I gave myself a year to complete for my children during a sabbatical year in France in 2010 - 2011. I covered some ground in my writing that year: my childhood, my parents, my wife, an actual death, an imagined death, a Buddha smashed on a doorstep, an attic in Maine.
You can find the collection gathered under the section header “365” on my home page. Many of you may not even have the context that they are a set or even what the origin of these pieces was. All of that is there. Almost a year of posts now.
Many of you have remarked along the way how personal the subject matter has been, often commending me for the intimacy. There’s a reason for that.
At the start of the 365 project I committed to never writing again after I finished these. Not surprisingly, things got personal quickly. Clearly I failed at the “I’ll never write again.” I believe I succeeded – well enough – in the larger project. You can find “me” in these essays, both real and aspirational. If my children read closely, they will certainly identify what mattered to their father.
When I find a moment, I’ll bundle these together into a collection I’ll make available here. Hopefully, they will find a bookshelf here and there. Measured by my level of confidence that I got key things down, then at least some of these are very good. I hope they find their way to the bookshelves of strangers.
I have some work to do to finish up on the Actor series. I’m dreading the next essay in that series, so I’ve backburnered that, but I haven’t lost sight of it, and I’ll face it at some point.
After that, I’m not sure how much memoir will be here. The pivot to fiction has been a rush for me, the challenge of a 100 Stories (97 to go!) a thrilling eight-year mission. I’ve enjoyed making everything up with impunity. I post #3 on Tuesday. I have a list as long as my arm of ideas for stories.
So, there may not be a lot more from the depths of my personal life: that was somewhat the point of “never write again.” Maybe pivoting away from the me-me-me of memoir honors that in my way. Maybe I’ve exhausted the parts in myself that I think might have resonance with readers. Maybe I’ve exhausted that level of interest in myself. Or, who knows, maybe I’m only getting started.
I’m rambling.
Here’s the end of the beginning of a love affair.
I remember the night I told her I loved her.
I’d returned from a family Christmas in Northern California. I drove through an insane downpour, and I could barely see the road in front of me, but I was determined to get to L.A. that evening.
Then there was a surprise detour in the Central Valley off of the I-5, and I should have stopped and found a hotel, but I was determined to make it back to Los Angeles. So I drove through small towns in the middle of nowhere, their roads intermittently washed out, and I drove through deep, deep floods hoping the car would make it.
The windshield wipers were never good in that car, and I could barely see through the blurry wiper trails. I drove through late overcast afternoon into evening and then past Santa Barbara and around stones washed from the cliffs onto the Pacific Coast Highway. I plunged on and around the washout and the boulders, and I reached Santa Monica and saw the Ferris wheel in the distance, then the pier, then curving up towards the freeway entrance and getting so close and racing over and parking at her place in Hollywood before I’d even gone home, vaulting up her front steps.
She answered the door. There were her bright blue eyes and her soft accent and her lower lip that juts out ever so asymmetrically. I hadn’t seen her for a week and later that night we were doing jigsaw puzzles on the round dining room table. The bright table lamp glowed on the fine down of her arms, and then the way she reached across me to test a piece somewhere, the side of her face right there, made my insides groan like a ship from the waves rolling off of her.
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