A few years back, there was a popular country song about how songs could trigger memories for people. I remember thinking at the time how true that was, and could rattle off a dozen examples of how a particular song would stimulate a memory, usually involving either a woman or a meal ( I like to eat, so shoot me). I didn't really appreciate the song's message until just recently, when I was driving I90 west through New York.
I was headed west, going to visit my wife's sister in Minneapolis, listening to satellite radio jazz. And there is Nina, singing that damn Irving Berlin song, "You Can Have Him." If you don't know the song, it's about the end of a love affair, and the woman is singing about all the things she wanted to do for her man--fix his favorite breakfast, wash his hair, rub his feet, go out and get the Sunday paper, spend the day in bed, the little things, you know. And suddenly, there was Trish in the car with me.
Right now, I'm a widower on the wrong side of 55 and much too rapidly approaching 60. At the time I was involved with Trish, I was in my late twenties, married to a wonderful, if somewhat unstable, woman, with a five year old daughter.
Trish and I worked for a human service agency serving a not very attractive population--chronically mentally ill adults. The label just meant they had been hospitalized for a diagnosable mental illness for five of the last ten years, or five times in the last seven years.
I was trying to teach them how to keep a job when what they needed was instruction in how to be socially appropriate. Trish, 25 then, was a service coordinator, the person who made sure they were getting all the services available to them in the community. We crossed paths frequently, often serving the same people, and we also shared an office. Us, another service coordinator, and whatever recreation leader was working that day.
Our workday began at 8:30AM and ended at 4:00PM. If we were both in the building at lunch time, we would usually eat together. Three or four times a month, especially during the summer, we'd duck out to a restaurant for some decent food, or brown bag it to the park for a picnic lunch.
She was living with a guy who worked for another agency on the west side of the county, separated, but not divorced from the mother of his eighteen year old son, who was staying with them at the time. She had a permanent case of dyspepsia (heartburn, bloat and gas, both ways). We had been working together about six months when I told her, jokingly, that if she'd sleep with me, I'd tell her how to cure her upset stomach.
In the time we'd been working together, there had not been a day, not a single freaking day, she had not complained about Dick, her lover, or his son, Jeff. It didn't take a whole lot of brain power to figure out why she was belching and farting all over the place.
When I made my offer, she actually thought about it before she answered. "If I weren't with Big Dick (as she called him), I'd take you up on that."
Not smart enough to keep my mouth shut, I shot back, "If you weren't with Big Prick (as I referred to him), you wouldn't have to." Wow, did that start her thinking. She opened her mouth to object, and give me a piece of her mind, but I just put my finger over her mouth to shush her and told her to think about it.
She apparently did, but it took her another six months. During that time we shared a lot of personal stuff, relationship philosophies, relationship problems, favorites (music, food, places to visit, that crap). We found that we had a lot in common, both were from working class families, both the first in the family to go to college, we liked the same kind of music (progressive jazz), preferred the King to MickyD, liked our Italian on the spicy side, liked to bowl, drive with the top down, and wanted sex four or more days a week.
For me, that last desire, I shared with Trish, was something my wife and I weren't anyplace close to, anymore. In fact it was closer to four times a year, and that was a struggle. Lillie, my wife, was going a real rough patch. Since Carrie had been born, her PMS had progressively gotten worse, to the point that the only time she could stand to be touched was the day she started bleeding. I'm not talking just sex. About the only thing she could tolerate was a light kiss on the lips. Anything else, she'd recoil like she'd been burned. Not the kind of reaction to nurture a marriage.
In addition to the physical stuff, she had lost three people who were very important to her--her mom, her gram, and an older woman who had been both mentor and friend, in the past eighteen months. Working in the field, I was not totally surprised to get a call at work one Tuesday from her grief counselor that he had recommended to her that she check herself into the psych wing of the local teaching hospital. He told me that she had called him from home and seemed to be unable to maintain a coherent line of conversation, and, in fact, her speech was rapid, sounding like an auctioneer in full sale mode.
I explained to my director what was going on. She told me to take whatever time I needed, and not to worry about losing the time from my various time banks.
I called Lillie at home to be sure she was all right, told her Dave had called me and described her call to him. She was a little pissed, but understood when I said he was concerned. When I told her I was on my way home, she just said "Thank you." She did not object when I got her into the car and started for the hospital. "Do you think he's right?" she wanted to know.
"I think we need to get a second opinion," I told her. She accepted that, and, later, the recommendation by the psychiatrist that she be admitted for evaluation and treatment, if needed. It was the longest, hardest two-week separation we ever had, before or since, including my coronary bypass a few years ago.
I had run into Trish on the way out and told her what was happening. She was waiting in my driveway when I got home. When I asked her in for a drink, she refused saying she couldn't come in when Lillie wasn't home. Instead, she invited me to her place. I called the babysitter and asked if they could keep Carrie overnight. They agreed.
At Trish's, she disappeared for a few minutes to change from her work clothes. She came back in one of those super long tees that covered her from shoulder to knee. We talked for a couple of hours as I brought her up to date on what was going on with Lillie. She kept the drinks coming, not so fast we got shit faced or anything, but enough to keep the tongues wagging. That was the night she told me she had broken up with Dick.
