The Tree

Last night when I got home from work there was an innocent-enough looking envelope in my mailbox from Bombardi, The Tree Experts. I had contracted Mr. Bombardi a few weeks ago to cut down a tree in the back yard of the beach house where I spend my summer weekends, and the bill's arrival meant the deed had been done. The tree--which I had identified for nine years as a dogwood but was apparently a cherry--is gone.

This tree had become an architectural challenge, but for two weeks in the spring it erupted into breathtaking pink blossoms. In the summer it shaded the back porch and kitchen from an otherwise scorching afternoon sun. To me, the house is as unimaginable without that tree as it is without the roof. Every year when I was married, every mid-month of May, I would rally our two winter-worn souls out to the house so my husband and I wouldn't miss at least one sight of its bloom.

I have a distinct memory of the morning when my former husband and I first looked at the house. The dizzy, giddy, hung-over morning after we eloped. He noted then that the tree should probably be taken down before we moved in. I insisted not. It was an October day and the leaves had just begun to turn; although I couldn't have known the glory that spring would bring, I already knew that the tree belonged with the house as much as I belonged with the man who had become my husband the night before. He let it be. So we bought the house, and the tree joined our little family.

Off and on for nine years, this man who used to be my husband would remind me, gently, lovingly, that the tree I adored should really be removed. He feared it was nudging at the foundation of the house, and the back deck surrounding it was obviously beginning to bulge from the growth of its sturdy trunk. I would adamantly shut the conversation down, or tease him out of it. He always relented.

The marriage ended, as you know. Although I loved him for a long time, through great joy and unimaginable pain, our foundation, if you'll pardon the obvious, actually had ruptured. A foreshadowing of what was to become of the tree.

As much as its blooming meant to me, last spring I didn't see it; I'd had surgery and couldn't make the trip to the beach. In truth, there were relatively few weekends last summer when I made it out to the beach house, even after I'd healed and gotten clearance to travel. Being there hurt savagely. Over the years the house had become the child my husband and I had agreed not to have: It was one thing we loved and tended together; a shared, beloved project. We were going to watch it grow old together, flourishing in our care.

This year I missed the tree's bloom, too--the last time I was at the house it was just about to erupt into blossom. Mr. Bombardi must have taken it down just at the height of its pink glory. Now, of course, I won't see it again.

It was so solid and so beautiful, I believed it would outlast both my husband and I, but keep the memory of us somehow, maybe in its intricate branches. I suppose it did outlive our marriage, just not in the way we'd thought. I'm bothered that I don't even know if I have any pictures of the tree in bloom, other than those saved in my mind's eye.

This is what I want to say.

Sometimes the things that are the most dear to us, that seem absolutely permanent, are actually built on a fault line. They are destined not to last. But this doesn't mean they weren't perfect in the lifetime they had.

Maybe the next time I go to the house, I'll see that the space where there used to be a tree lets sunlight into the house in a way I'd never imagined, and maybe I'll love the new light.

Maybe I will plant flowers in sunshine where there used to be shade, and maybe I will delight in those flowers even more than that precious, blossoming tree.

Maybe the man who was my husband will stop missing the beloved house, and our life together; maybe the next time I hear his voice it will ring with joy and hope, rather than pain and loss for what no longer is.

If these things came true, I might not miss the tree after all.

We Do Things Differently Here

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley

I threw a party recently. A Saturday night, an apartment filled with friends, a new man to introduce to these people—my chosen family. This was going to be fun.

In the life I had before my old life, before I was married, I gave parties often. Loud and smoky and crowded, the kind where you call your friends the next day to laugh and cobble together the pieces of what had happened the night before based on each person’s fragmented memory.

When my former husband and I first moved in together, we had one party. I remember that we had just redecorated our apartment, and it felt like the right time to celebrate our new lives. Even with a pale beige carpet, it seemed like a party was in order.

It wasn’t the same. Maybe we were awkward together in our new togetherness; maybe I was afraid of red wine and the carpet. But something, for some reason, didn’t click. It was one of those parties that feels like it never reaches critical mass—every time one group came, another group left. I remember one of my friends commenting on the new decor, “It looks like grown-ups live here. Where do they let you stay?” She was right. It didn’t feel like I belonged there, completely.

I remember what I wore. I remember a lot of the music I played. And as always, I remember worrying about the man I was now living with, who would eventually become my husband. I worried that he would be angry at me for worrying. Or angry at me for not paying enough attention to him. Or angry at me for paying too much attention to him.

I’m not exactly a wallflower, and I certainly would not have been able to articulate it at the time—or for many of the years that followed—but I worried constantly about this man’s anger. Like snails on the beach at high tide, sometimes you can’t see them, but you know they’re there. Step into the water and you’ll feel them.

So, anyway, I threw a party on a recent Saturday night. Originally, the plan was that my new man was going to come on Friday night; we would take care of all of the party miscellany on Saturday morning, and have the afternoon to relax and get ready.

I was determined not to be my old, anxious self this go-around. Those days were over. It was just friends coming for drinks, after all. I was going to relax and enjoy it. I was going to take care of the big chores before Saturday, and together my man and I would pull it together on Saturday morning. We would even have time to nap before guests arrived! Naps, friends, parties: Life as it should be.

As the week wore on, though, it seemed less and less likely that he would be able to make it to my house on Friday night; all hell was breaking loose at his job. Saturday, early, we decided. It would be plenty of time. It would be fine.

Saturday morning came and went without a word from him. I was hesitant to call—the man was exhausted, who knew how late he would sleep until? And there wasn’t that much to do. On the other hand, thirty of my nearest and dearest would be descending on my apartment in a matter of hours, and I needed help.

Finally, I heard from him. We exchanged messages. It was 1pm.

He was coming at 4.

As in, 4pm. Only a couple of hours before I had to get in the shower to get ready for my guests.

I started to become anxious. And angry.

This, finally, was familiar territory. Unfamiliar to me with this man, but familiar territory nevertheless. I was surprised, and disappointed, and hurt--this man does what he says he’s going to do. Like my grandfather, he seems to have mastered the art of simply showing up.

But he wasn’t showing up, this time. Not like he’d said he would.

I know how this rolls. I know how to keep anger and frustration at a low simmer—just low enough that it doesn’t ruin your night, but you never really stop feeling it, either. That old, familiar feeling. You put it away, but you know it’s there. Snails at the beach.

By the time he came, there wasn’t time to fight—not really. He saw that I was frustrated, he had good reasons for his delayed arrival, he kept assuring me that everything would be fine. It was only errands for a party, after all. And of course, everything was fine.

It’s just that I wasn’t hoping for fine. I was hoping for something completely different than what I had known for the past twelve years.

The evening came and went. My first party after my divorce was once again a loud, crowded, what exactly happened last night? event. This man was wonderful—fun, funny, hanging out with my friends, helping me recycle empty bottles at 3am, mopping my floor the next day as we stepped over smashed crackers and stray nuts.

All’s well that ends well, I told myself. It was a great party. So what if I was angry? It worked out. And while I had let the edges of my anger show, I had never really unfurled the full cloth of it. We had hit a glitch. Happens to everyone.

A few nights later, as we sat together in my apartment, he said something that caught me off guard.

I picture your anger, he said, as a balloon. He held his hands out, round, in the shape of an inflated balloon. If this is the shape of your emotions and how you express yourself normally, he said, when you’re angry—here he pulled his hands apart, expanding the size of this imaginary balloon—you allow yourself a different set of rules. You say things and do things you would never allow yourself if you weren’t angry.

I thought about it. I agreed.

I thought, Doesn’t everyone?

That question hung around me for days. Doesn’t everyone? It was impossible not to think of my former husband. I pictured the balloon of his emotions—always swollen with anger, sometimes stretched so full that it exploded on everything and everyone around it. That tension had kept me a little worried, a little off-center, every minute for twelve years.

I thought about my mother and my sister, too. Their balloons were the same. No: They were a bit worse. A bit more frightening. With my ex-husband, there was the occasional chance that I, my feelings, my heart, could temporarily be more important than his anger. At these rare times, the tension tugging at the sides of the flimsy emotional rubber would ease. With my family, though, those times never came. The man I married would never have called me a shocking, ugly name. My mother does, to this day. Only when she’s angry. But she’s always angry.

I kept coming back to the question: Doesn’t everyone do this? Doesn’t everyone allow themselves an expanded set of do’s and don’ts in those moments when they are really, really angry? Like, steam-coming-out-of-your-ears angry?

Here’s what:

No.

They don’t.

This man, he eased into my life like a rain shower on a hot day, and he doesn’t do this. I can no more imagine him raging at me—overtly or covertly—than I can imagine him pushing an old lady off a sidewalk. Or quitting his job to join the Cirque du Soleil. As in: Not. Happening. Ever.

In the beginning, the very beginning of what is becoming us, I believed that he was too uncomfortable with his own anger to express it. He doesn’t care for messiness in any form, and angry falls into this emotional category. I suspected that, like my former husband, he would eventually emerge from Best Behavior, and I would see exactly how far the sides of his balloon could stretch.

I am rethinking this, however. I have seen glimpses of his balloon by now. It seems to be the same size when he’s angry as when he’s not.

It’s not that he doesn’t experience anger. It’s that this particular emotion doesn’t change the substance of who he is.

So I’ve started to think of it this way.

It’s like we grew up in different countries, he and I. Where he grew up, anger was an emotion like any other. It didn’t get extra credit or special exemptions. When someone was angry at you, maybe it felt like they still loved you. I suspect that his parents, in anger, never told him terrible things about himself.

Maybe where he grew up, such a thing simply wasn’t part of the culture. Like the Japanese not wearing shoes indoors. Maybe no one had to explicitly tell you the rules; it just wasn’t done. You watched and you learned.

I grew up somewhere different. We spoke a different language. In the place where I grew up, when your mother told you that she wished you had been an abortion, you didn’t cry. You just let your balloon get bigger. The next time she said it, or something worse, you were better prepared. Your balloon had stretched to include words and thoughts you needed to protect yourself from the people whose job it was to take care of you.

It’s never easy, acclimating to a new culture. You fumble and get things wrong; you start again. But toddlers eventually learn to walk, I tell myself. I’m never going to be able to do this! isn’t even a thought in their minds. They just keep at it, and one day they’re upright.

So.

I’m living in a new culture, now. There’s very little chance that I will never master this. Only the very good chance that I will fail, and fail, and fail again. And eventually, bit by bit, the chance that someday I will get the hang of it. This new culture.

Because the past is a foreign country. We do things differently, here.

We Run Toward What Is Familiar

I was thinking that today while I was thinking about the man I'm falling in love with, and thinking how uncomfortable it can be that he is so different.

We run toward what is familiar.

And this man in so many ways is not familiar.

Familar, for me, tends to mean a little bit mean and a lot but what about me.

It doesn't necessarily mean kind or interested or engaged. And this man I'm loving is all of those things.

I think that when many of us run toward what is familiar, we are running towards what our souls feel calmed by the repetition of. Sadly, we often repeat what we've known even if it scared us, or tarnished our memories of ourselves or changed the stories we tell about how our lives happened.

I fell in love with this man about a week before I met him. He writes a blog and I read it, and fell in love. Hoped against hope that he wouldn't be horribly geeky and skinny and weird. Made an online date. And he wasn't geeky or skinny or weird; he was beautiful and tatooed and sexy. And he fell in love with me.

And it happened just like that.

Here is maybe the only meaningful thing I can really say about running towards what is familiar: It certainly feels weird to run towards what is utterly different. It is unsteadying to be held by a man who can hold all of you, and who wants to. It's fine to sit leg-to-leg with him on your living room bench, contemplating what the future might hold in a way that only two independent forty-somethings can. And it feels crazy when his face makes your heart leap like a nineteen-year old's.

Here's a really crazy thing: He gave me until the end of the year to move in with him. Or not.

He's not kidding. He says that if we don't know by January that we want to live together, we never will. And that that's not what he wants.

Who is this man?

Back to what I said:

Running towards the unfamiliar can be like plunging into icy water--you simply brace yourself and move in. You can't expect what's coming; your senses don't know how.

But once you're in. Oh...so warm.