Date Night

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

Frank returned to the midwest after spending the early spring with the family in California while I flew back to my solitary retreat in Minnesota. He walked in the front door of our condo last Thursday as if it were any other day and together we resumed our familiar life as an old married couple. I’m reminded of the slow-moving pairs shuffling down Broadway with their canes and their hats and their groceries. All the men wore fedoras even in August. All the women were burdened by enormous handbags filled with used kleenex, purplish lipstick, and sweet treats for the grandchildren. They finished each other’s sentences, repeated each other’s jokes in English and Yiddish and allowed time every day for the requisite amount of bickering. We are not that kind of old married couple. Technically we fit the definition. We are both in our eighties and have been legally entwined since I stepped on a glass in the backyard in Great Barrington in 1981 wearing a shocking pink skirt and tag sale lime green shoes that pinched my toes. But living in two different places and separating for a long stretch of time every spring has made our life together unpredictable and open to interpretation. Some people do not approve.

Photo by Doğu Tuncer on Unsplash

When I’m alone, I carry the heft of my age around with me like a large box from the condo package room I have to lug upstairs all by myself. Sometimes it’s difficult and sometimes I can’t do it. I monitor my energy level and critique my appearance and think about end times. But every year, the time alone also feels like getting acquainted with an identical twin I didn’t know I had. I observe her taking care of herself, going deep into a Chinese restaurant menu of spiritual traditions that speak to her and ask to be given consideration. Buddhism, hasidut, Merton and Teilhard. I watch this part of myself entering a deep contemplative space, thinking about aging and loss like a research scientist on one of those cushy grants where you don’t actually have to produce anything. Read, write, meditate. Repeat.

When Frank comes home, we pick up the very different practice of aging together in the everyday. We consider our respective dietary requirements which are fiendishly different. We demonstrate our exercise regimens. We alert each other when people die. Barney Frank, Sonny Rollins, people who have made music and noise. We cuddle and giggle over long-lost girl group song lyrics. We hold each other in a rapture of deep familiarity. Every gesture resonates with its archetype from back in the seventies when we first met and even further back to our childhoods in the fifties embedded in the stories we’ve told each other over and over again. Our knowledge of one another is cellular.

On our fourth night together, we celebrate our first date night of the season, going out to our favorite local restaurant where we sit at the bar and enjoy ten dollar happy hour martinis followed by mussels and falafel wraps and baby kale salad. We immerse ourselves in the world. This is why happy hour is happy. It’s a celebration of our longevity, fifty years this coming January, and how much we’ve witnessed. Two sons, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Many arrivals and departures. The following morning, which happens to be Memorial Day, we go to check out the cemetery on Lyndale. If you go cemetery shopping you have to be matter-of-fact about it like it’s just another errand. Go to the bank, go to the post office, go to the cemetery. We find it lovely. Just the right size. Not like the vast necropolises off the LIE in Queens. Not like the tiny burial ground in El Dorado, California with its displays of plastic flowers. In the Minneapolis cemetery, there are several spouts to allow visiting families to water living plants and trash cans so they can dispose of their garden waste. The cemetery is dotted with old shade trees.

Straightaway, we decide on one large stone. We’ve only just regrouped after seven weeks and we don’t want to think of separating, even underground. This is a major departure for me after decades of leaning towards cremation. Now after four years of practicing separation and reading up on the mysteries, I am moved by the engraved stone with the husband’s birth and death dates and the wife’s unfinished history. One of us will have to wait and I’m terrible at waiting and a rank amateur at not knowing. I will have to deepen my practice. In the meanwhile, we have date night. There will be laughter and hand-holding and gratitude.

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