house of nezua

The dissolution of my 24-year marriage was finally (after five years) final. I was living in a small apartment in Gloucester, New Jersey with my 19-year old daughter, who soon left because she wanted to be on her own (but ended up sharing a large apartment with her older brother, which suited mom just fine, thank you very much).

The Reluctants were a year old and I had a terrible crush on Joe, the only guy in our band of three. We’d planned to go to the Pennsylvania Folk Festival in September ’99, and I arranged my vacation around that. But the burden of my affection was an affliction for Joe and we ended up having a row just before the Festival, and didn’t go.

Slightly heartbroken and definitely bored at home during my failed vacation, I successfully connected to the internet for the very first time. (Previous attempts had gotten me nowhere.) Since my main interest was in songwriting, I Googled that and ended up on The Songwriter’s Bulletin Board, a neat little site where you would post lyrics and have them critiqued. I read some lyrics posted there, some good, some not so good, and the critiques – also some good, some not so good. I decided that I had nothing to lose and posted one of mine. The responses that I got were interesting, and overall positive. Especially positive was one from the moderator of the board, Thomas. I idly (not really so idly) began scanning all of his posts, and found a profoundly compassionate and wildly intelligent soul evident in his words. I quickly became very interested indeed in this Thomas character.

Over a course of weeks, we were corresponding privately via e-mail and “graduated” to telephone conversations. I early on found myself in love with this man, and his declaration of mutuality was fervently accepted, cherished. I warned him that I was but “a fat old grandmom” and was chastised by him for what I considered honesty. He declared that his interest was not in the age or shape of my body, but the age and shape of my soul. He lied not.

We maintained this long-distance relationship for several months; some of the months were horrible (as when he grudgingly deferred to Michelle’s wishes to “try one more time” and stayed there for a week – until he found the crack pipe) and all were suffused with an overriding consuming longing to be together.

He finally came to New Jersey for a visit; we’d long predicted a tearing of the fabric of the universe would occur when we finally found ourselves in real proximity to each other, and so it was.

A couple of months later, I went to Tucson (his home) and helped him move his things to New Jersey. Tom hated it. Transplanted from the desert to The Garden State, he might as well have been sent to Mars and, in fact, would have preferred that. He lasted here only through that September and then took his three-day Greyhound ride back to Arizona. He came back to fetch me and all of my worldly belongings (and his, which he’d left) that November. We arrived in Tucson on Thanksgiving Day. The dog ate turkey and threw up. After that, things only got better.

And better.

Thomas’ love for his desert was contagious. His love for me was unquestionable. As was mine for him. We wasted not one moment of our lives together. The more I knew him, the more I valued and cherished this extraordinary man. His life had been an unravelling of pain and error, sometimes his, more often, inflicted by others. Either way, he took it all in, pondered it, learned from it. Took up the thorns and bricks, the mortar of failures and tears, and made of himself a beautiful, wondrous man. “Good life,” we would say. Often. It was our motto. Good life. Glances in the kitchen and catching the other’s eye. Good life. Bone tired in bed after a long day. Good life. Digging a trench to bury pipe for an extension of pluming to the aviary. Good life. Laying around on the couch and reading. Good life. For five years, we were full of good life.

On that night, I was still reading in bed but he’d finished his book. He turned off his bedside lamp and snuggled against me in the December chill. “This is heaven to me,” he murmured. “And to me,” I replied.

Two hours later he was gone.

Another tear in the fabric of the universe. It’s a fragile thing.

roses in the wood

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