Set adrift fatherless sons, I recognize them with immediate intimacy. It doesn’t matter at what age because I have been through most of the stages as I pass through my middle age. Now closer to the end, it is with resignation rather rage at the circumstance.

My salvation  – that which tempered me was that one man had stepped forward, albeit unprepared, he provided security, some routine, the discipline to fight through the fear, as did he as a teen stepping into a world war of other fatherless men’s making.

You could find Alan routinely on my couch weeknights. Generally quiet. At times amused.  He took in every word, interacting only with regular visitors of equal age and status.

He was a decade my senior. California born, his straight stringy light brown hair still collar length since the Sixities. His face and body belayed a unambitious, unathletic, satisfactorily lazy laid back pay-check to pay-check existence.

He must of been a handsome teen as he graduated Van Nuys High in the Summer of 69. Physically he resembled a cross of Peter Fonda and Troy Donahue with a John Wayne voice but life was catching up quickly on Al.

Surviving his younger years without a father, never knowing who his father was, he, like me was a latchkey kid. His mother, Dolores had to rise for work every day before dawn to wait tables at Dupars on Ventura Boulevard.

Dolores had taught him how to rise every agonizing morning for a menial job and introduced Marlboro reds to pass time.  Later, suffering from emphysema and on oxygen, her example brought him to reduce a three pack a day habit to one as he watched her bring a lit cigarette to her oxygen, savagely burning her face.

Alan was an intriguing combination of integrity and sloth. He could be trusted with money and secrets. He didn’t ask questions but was oblivious to his appearance and body language.  So much so, employment became a revolving door of odd driving and delivery jobs in The Basin.

Lost in a generation and setting of dashing, gracefully aging middle-class suburban commuters, he felt strangely entitled but abandoned by his position in Tinseltown. Often racist, generally angry, his poverty was not of his doing in his mind.

Gentlemanly yet perverted, his contradictions were exposed only in private. His sadness at being alone apparent, his hatred at being white and looked over a constant dialogue.

To his credit, as the years on my couch went by, he once said, “I wish I would’ve had a father who taught me some skill, something of value for my life.”

I recognized this statement because my loving father, sparing me the orphanage and an uncertain life could only teach me “don’t lay down near a [Sherman] tank for a firing position” and “don’t break your back for 40 years working” like me.

Perhaps, Alan knew the latter advice of my father, he sat smoking every bit of free weed he possibly could on my couch, enjoying the socialization he never found in his little Reseda studio petri dish of a dungeon.

As I migrated permanently east, I often wondered how he was doing. I recognized the fatherless son and cared about his welfare.  My suspicion is that he has passed away, since I’m compelled to bring him alive to you.

my heart pounds slowly against the rhythm of the night

suppressing it slows the sweaty glue that eminents  from my pores with the slightest movement 

rendered motionless in this bed, these sheets my only respite, salvation but I’m stuck

because there is no air the cat cries at my window, exhausted, defeated, dim witted by the day

his shrill an octave higher than the thousand dying crickets that cry a story below

that pierce our ears, I hold down a beat with my heart, all one vibration, competing

all dying at our own pace, dim witted and desperate for nothing but a breath, one wet breath after another

I’d just turned fifteen and my father decided we’d take an August road trip. It was 1974 and we were driving the Pinto to go to see my father’s mother and family in Philadelphia.

Hormones running wild, I was very unhappy to leave my friends, pool jumping, delinquency.

Unbeknownst to my mother and I, dad made a bet with his seven siblings that he’d make it to Philly in under 5 days. We dint stop for food till Amarillo.

I was cramped in the back of that two-door Pinto sedan with a styrofoam ice chest as a companion. no air conditioning.

In the middle of the first night my Mother fell asleep driving through the desert. She crossed the double line, nearly driving head-on into a tractor trailer.

I was in the front seat for that light show and horns. Shocking. The noise woke Dad in the backseat. He took over. I was happy to be in the backseat. I stayed there for the rest of the trip, even after my first wet dream.

It was terrible. I had almost died several times before, I got over that but this, after never masturbating, it was awfully uncomfortable in every conceivable way. I went to sleep.

When I woke we were off the side of the Interstate; dad asleep on a concrete picnic table. Mother and I locked inside the Pinto.

We made St Louis by the next afternoon. We were staying the week with one of Dad’s WWII Sargent buddies, Tony.

Tony had a daughter. She was 17 or 18, a sizzling Sicilian beauty. I had no chance. She disappeared an hour after we arrived. Like a roach when the light goes on, if I caught a glimpse, she ran. Gone.

It all sucked until Tony and his wife started yelling. They were Italian. Funny. Loud. The whole block was Italian. “Diego Hill”. Loud. I swear I had pizza every night.

Down in his converted basement Tony had built a bar. He insisted I join in a few beers with him and my dad. Away from the women. Falstaffs. Man like. These were my first beers with my dad.

Tony looked like an ugly Humphrey Bogart. Real dog face G.I Joe. People did what he asked. My dad laughed. You know that “ahh fuck it! why didn’t I think of that? Wife will kill me” laughs.

Over a few Falstaffs I sat silently as they talked soldier talk. How the country was going to shit. Bad word. Really bad words. There were bad words flying like the Allies over Hamburg. Dad only said these while driving. I knew them.

Every day Tony and Dad would leave for a few with a bunch of Tonys at the VFW. I found Tony’s Playboy stash and tore out all the center folds, stole them. (One had Sybil Shepherd.)

Mother was always with his wife, Jeanne, while she cooked in the kitchen. She looked like Danny Devito. She was always cooking. We never left that house.

I listened to Yellow Brick Road over and over while tearing out centerfolds and watched the Cardinals on TV alone.

Yea rock and roll.

There are some things simply too painful to discuss or dissect in one’s life, even when a life’s an open book. There are pages too inexplicable, too agonizing to resurrect. We have all suppressed those feelings and though poison to the soul, it is best isolated in the dark recess of the past.

As the adopted child, there are these times; that, beyond our control, we are left open, vulnerable to circumstances not of our doing, not of our choosing yet agonizing.

There were lives lived before we were thrust upon one another. Lives damaged by circumstance and environments foreign to our perception of the world as a child. Inconceivable.

So it was for me, like for many others with whom I have discussed adoption, adaption, alienation with the lives in which we were thrust. As I arrived in the United States with my parents I was unaware of family other than the three of us. As we were transferred westward, ultimately my father retired from the military and the dynamic changed.

I became aware that during the Depression my mother had two children, a son and daughter in her little country corner of western Pennsylvania. Years later she recalled how as a teenager, she had an agonizing delivery. So awful when James (“Jim”) John was born, she rejected having him laid in her arms. “Get him away from me”, she recalled screaming.

Forever regretting that, she worried a lifetime for that son. He had a terribly – physical and psychological abusive childhood at the hands of his father. A year later she birthed her princess for whom that husband felt could never do wrong. And so the dynamic was set in motion culminating in divorce by 1950.

Jim became the perfect 1950s rebel. He rode motorcycles, his hair in a D.A., rolled blue jean cuffs and pack of smokes in his white tee shirt sleeve. He fathered his first baby as a teen as well, for which he was sent for statutory rape to L.A. County, when it was a chain link fence in a cow field.

This was the young man that my father inherited the responsibility to toss cartons of cigarettes over the fence, consoling his new wife. Upon release Jim had another baby daughter with that teenage, rebel loving blonde bombshell. Then she left him, stealing away the two daughters forever.

By the time we made it to Pasadena, Jim was with a second wife, two more babies. Little did I know, because his stays at the California Youth Authority were so numerous, he was a drop out and could not read or write. I had nothing to do with that but in the future it was a source of resentment.

He didn’t have time or talent to craft a relationship with me. He was unable to build healthy relationships with his name sake son and daughter. He was an emotional cripple. Instead he exercised the type of abuse he was accustomed as a child. Then, that wife left with those children.

Sure he tried a couple times to bond. He brought me a case of grape soda as a birthday present in back-to-back years. But he generally was consumed with choppers and Cadillacs – the 1950s editions with big tails. He finagled money from my parents, saying he was doing “X” while buying “Y”.

He was relentlessly teasing me. It was how he “shows affection”, my mother would say. But it continued as I became a teen and it didn’t matter where or when, even in front of his sister, her husband and kids out in public. He called all my rock gods, “faggots”. “Why do you have those faggots on your wall?”

Once momentarily, he confided that he knew what that alligator clip was for at the end of my homemade beads. He said, “I saw pot plants on the roof of Muir” (probably the one week of his freshman year he went to high school).

Maybe he thought he was expressing brotherly concern. We really didn’t have a relationship other than those moments, although we were at his house for every Christmas or holidays. Perhaps I should thank him for creating my thick skin.

As I grew older she apologized for him as if there was resentment for my ambition to preserver through our lower middle class circumstance; that, she “had time with me that she didn’t with him”. She was forever forgiving of him. He was of the Depression. I was a Baby Boomer. He was an itinerate truck driver while I had ambition for college. We had nothing in common but the woman we called mother and she knew we were wholly opposite.

So often when he had run into hard times, he would run to his mother, which usually left me sleeping on the couch. My entire life in California, he was always moving down the block from us. Once he even showed up at our front door unannounced 300 miles away from Los Angeles at Christmas 1975 with a new baby and a third wife. He moved to that little town and stayed. Ten years ago when mother died, it was very hard for him.

At the hospital we spoke daily for the first time in 30 years. He was incessantly asking how mother never knew what a delinquent I was? He had been run out of little Brookville, Pennsylvania for his overt petty behavior but I was golden, even though I had been a topic of all those sheriffs he had breakfast with at the little local diner. Maybe it was a matter of style. Perhaps it was simply a different time. I had no answer.

When we buried her, I gave a eulogy. As I spoke some prepared words regarding how I defied the notion that “you can’t pick family but she had picked me”, I saw him in the back pew, despondent, inconsolable, staring at the floor.

When I walked from the casket, I said to him, “it will get better”. As always he negated my words. I wasn’t going to fight that battle anymore. After that day I considered calling him once in ten years. I also left a message on his machine once or twice. But he wasn’t a conversationalist and I knew those cultural and personal battles would arise, so even though I know my mother would’ve preferred I call him, I did not.

The last few days as his birthday came once again, I continued to think of him. I pondered how I could overcome these feelings to pick up the phone. Then I thought, he never called me. It works both ways.

Last night I slept terribly. I had a long dream in which my mother visited. It had been years since she came into my dreams. She was upset. She was trying to bake some birthday cakes it seemed. And I felt like she was angry at me for fucking them up by putting them in the freezer. Hours after I woke, my step-sister called to say Jim died last night, collapsed at home. Dead. He died on his 77th birthday.

Now I cannot ever tell him it wasn’t either of our fault that we didn’t have a relationship. We were thrust into an untenable situation not of our doing and we couldn’t find the grace or acceptance of our situation to share a laugh at how we ended up here. But I suspect he’d agree with me that it’s better this way.

an excerpt from an untitled work in progress.  I wrote this five years ago upon returning to the hometown I never knew

I thought it the perfect time to return to my German “heimat“, home town. It felt instinctually right or “Recht“, which in German has significant connotations –  a moral reasoning, entitlement, as Kant dissected it. Right holds great importance in the language and was my motivation.

It’s said “you can never go home”, which holds no moral weight thankfully because I developed a distinct character flaw whereby I do the opposite of what I’m told – at times quite innocently, while at others stubbornly overt.  In my fiftieth year, it seemed the right moment.

It had always been a dream; more, a goal to return to address those questions that continually swirl in my head – legitimacy, loss, a meaning to the unwanted life. A return was improbable once my adopted parents and I left the Continent. When my father retired from the Army in late 1965, financially we could’ve never afforded to return, even if desired. Hell, it was tough for them to get me to Disneyland.

Now, though, I asked my wife and daughters to pursue my selfish dream. As a reward, I planned a Bavarian Christmas. My wife loves Christmas. Germans invented it. My little girls love Santa. Kris Kringel was a German. Yet my focus would be on my return to my heimstadt, Pirmasens, if but for one day. I wanted my feet to touch the soil where I could’ve belonged. I wanted my hands on the mortar and timber that held me and the mother I never knew. This would be sufficient, provide perspective, suppress years of wonder.

So the story goes, before the sun rose on July 21, 1959 I was born of an unwed teenager in her mother’s home. My immediate future decided by my grandmother, who insisted I be summarily given away. Who could blame her since twenty-six months earlier my teenage mother gave birth to twin daughters from another statutory rape by the conquering army. Conquering armies have had their way with the youngest female survivors of wars for centuries. (Why do you think in male parlance we project sexual relationships as “conquests”?)

Before the sun rose the next day, I was gone without a trace, given in the night to a career Army Sargent and his wife. Within a month, my father had orders for France, I would never see my heimat… until now.

To bring two – 8 and 5 year old little girls to Europe for several weeks was daring fate. However, I wanted my children there for this moment. They are a piece of me. This is where our journey begins. In fact, they make this a victory lap.

We spent the first week near the Rhine River – Germania’s cradle. Fitting. Poetic. We could ease into this moment like intimate, lengthy foreplay (unlike my conception). We rented a little villa in the wine country, an hour drive to Mainz, Heidelberg, Mannheim, and their renown “Christmas Markets”. I could ease my family into this trip with the sights, sounds and smells of the season, building to a fitting crescendo.

It was Friday morning. My youngest, Lily, was already worn thin. I understood. She stayed awake overnight crossing the Atlantic and enjoyed a Christmas Market each day, returning late to the villa. Now, on my day, she wouldn’t get dressed. Pirmasens was the furthest drive – two hours. We were losing day. Finally we gave up, putting Lily’s boots on and jacket over her pajamas.

With a shy smile, my wife asked if she could drive. She was giddy to try the Autobahn. She didn’t realize this was a relief for me. I could sit; navigate without concentrating on Audis and BMWs doing 200 KMph. I could focus on this moment. Instead I grew anxious by the kilometer and as we reached Pirmasens, my stomach had full blown butterflies. Curious and difficult, I could not fight back my nerves as we crossed the long span bridge strung over a deep valley.

It was a bright, cold cloudless day as the bridge emptied us onto Zweibrücken Straße. It looked like any Main Street, USA – two way narrow traffic lanes, crowded on either side by old, often vacant, beat up buildings. It cut east-west across a steep north-south incline.

Due to the incline, streets run off Zweibrücken Straße in steep trajectories. There was no eye to urban planning. It’s rare to find German towns in a grid, unless of course Allied bombers obliterated them; even then many were meticulously re-engineered to former design. Thus against my male instincts, I told my wife to stop. I’d buy a map.

Gärtner Straße. FOUND IT! There it was in the whirling streets of the city’s center. It’s the address on my yellowed notarized papers, which I’ve kept all these years. Gärtner Straße 34 – my birth house. I felt excitement and dread, since my recently discovered sister, Jutta, referred to our neighborhood as “a slum”, which I could not get out of my head.

Gärtner Straße slid south down the hill. WAIT! Within half a city block, it became Bismarck Straße. We circled up and over Zweibrücken, back down Gärtner Straße again and again. It was a circular, dizzying maze of anonymous attached three story brown stones, none numbered in the thirties.

My wife stopped the car to look at the map closer. Okay. HUH!? A few blocks west, the map also has a Gartner Straße – no umlaut over the “a”. I grabbed my yellowed official papers to reconcile this oddity. As I flipped the pages, OH my GOD! The papers have the street with and without umlauts! You gotta be kidding! Unusually careless, I thought, especially for notarized official GERMAN papers!

We were losing more time, more sunshine. Let’s just double back west and try this Gartner Straße. There, we dropped down this steep street to find numbers in the thirties. “Let’s park”, I barked.

(Remember my wife, Kim’s driving the rental – a boxy Opel family van as) we stopped on this steep hill. The parking design was peculiarly perpendicular – front bumper to curb at an oblique upward angle, more like parking had been suited for a car driving up the hill. But this was now a one way street down the hill. (My illusion of superior German attention to detail and design was shot all to hell.)

Surveying the situation, we agreed to try the impossible – a 135 degree right turn uphill into a parking space. We didn’t make it. It would take a “three point” turn. The Opel had a manual stick and she needs to reverse but since I picked it up at the airport, I couldn’t find reverse, simply jamming it into reverse when needed.

Kim tries jamming it several times and with each unsuccessful try, we roll forward closer and closer to an unoccupied parked car. Our front bumper now almost presses against that passenger door panel. We’re out of tries. Worse we are blocking this skinny one-way street when exasperation turned to panic as we see the undercarriage of a BMW at the crest of the hill. It dropped down the street slowly. We’re all stuck.

Seconds seemed like minutes as a burly, redheaded German version of Barney Rubble hopped out of the BMW’s passenger side. He strode up to Kim’s driver window waving her out, as simultaneously asking in German if she needs help?

I lean over from the passenger seat to say in German “please, we’ve had problems with reverse…” as out of the corner of my eye, I catch his tall blonde, fur coat female companion walking down the street. I hear the ladies speaking English. In mid-phrase I switch to ask in English but before I can, he impatiently shakes his red head no, he doesn’t speak English. I’m in his way and he’s got better things to do with Fraulein Elegance.

Without a word, he pantomimes with right hand to the stick, pointing under the stick shift knob. Forking his fore and middle fingers – initially faking the motion – then pulling up on the stick knob; he slides it into reverse.

In my dumb-ass, embarrassed shock I exclaimed, SCHEISSE!(“Shit”) . Momentarily stunned, he stopped all these fluid, confident masculine movements and broke out laughing. I laughed that nervous uncomfortable – “I’m such a pussy” – laugh, repeating it, as if begging, pity me, have mercy. I’m pathetic.

Awkwardly, I try to salvage what manliness I may still possess with the stranger, repeating – “Scheisse… scheisse”. I continued the one way dialogue, as we parked. Unfazed, he turned and asked in German, “why are you in Pirmasens? I replied, “I was born here.” His face twisted, head cocked. Pausing, rhetorically he says, “In Pirmasens”? “yes. possibly on this street”, as I pointed a finger nowhere.

With an audible shrug, he got out. Momentarily I left my body. In a flash, my mind hit warp speed back to a childhood of mechanical ineptitude and uselessness, as I recalled my inability to identify a monkey from a socket wrench, closed-end from open-end, righty tighty, lefty loosy; that was, my father’s disappointment in me: “Jesus, Mack, I swiped a tank engine and put it in a ’51 Cadillac”, he repeatedly reprimanded my mechanical misanthropy. This stranger thought the same of me, as he pondered how I could be from here. The whole scene assured that I could’ve been a moron here too.

The trauma subsiding, I walked down the street looking for #34. On the side we parked where only odd numbers. The entire other side – the even side of this Gartner Straße was a vacant scar, as if razed by bulldozer.

Lily joined me at the bottom of the hill, where I had found even numbered homes – all single digit as the street conveniently dead-ended. So disappointed, I sense the street had been altered. Lily was happy just to be out of the Opel. She said, “I’m hungry”.

I looked up the hill like an eviscerated Sisyphus and started the climb with Lily, who would soon become my latest boulder in my pathetic passion play where nothing has ever come easy. This life’s been a boulder.

Damnit! I know it was a small house but I should be able to find it, I mumbled with each step. I will not surrender as my stubborn (“hard headed kraut” my father called me) instinct compelled me to drive up the hill over Zweibrücken Straße with the faint hope the numbers might start again on the other side.

But it was no longer Gartner Straße. I stopped the car in the middle of the street and dropped my head. My big fat, hard head, my spirit fell to the floor board. Time for a Hail Mary. A desperate turn left. Maybe Gartner Straße swerved to the west – disjointed from the lower portion of the street.

The road dead-ended into the cracked asphalt of an empty parking lot. There stood 4 detached – three-story dilapidated barracks. Obviously abandoned for years, the windows – some boarded, most without glass, long brown weeds swayed in the cold breeze framing the vacated grounds of… HEY! Barracks? Barracks! The skeletons of the Occupation.

Suddenly I realized it fit my mother’s description. She said that on that warm July night they “carried [me] up the hill to Army Housing” from my birth house. Somewhere in one of those barracks, my parents fixed a bureau drawer for my first “bed”.

It was so close that for days, weeks she recalled watching my teen mother walk home, my sisters in hand, ducking under my drying diapers strung on the clothesline from barracks windows. My new mother wondering what my teen mother felt, as she watched her walk home nightly. Until the end of her life, my mother pondered the sadness she must have felt passing by her forsaken baby. She shared a mother’s pain.

It all came together as I stared at the barracks: my devastated teen mother, my devastated hometown, my devastated country. Occupation. Abandoned women. Abandoned children. Abandoned buildings. Abandonment and rejection at so many levels for so many lives. Loss. We collectively surrender to the happenstance of others’ history, as we subordinate what precious little power we have to those mightier.

As I stared into the dark void of these blighted buildings, I realized I have fought a losing battle to overcome the happenstance of history. I saw ghosts inside going about their business so, so long ago. For a moment my spirit resuscitated as I saw the joy of my new parents laying their new baby in a drawer. They gave me back some power.

In my left breast jacket pocket – over my heart, I brought a yellowed, black and white photo of them, arm-in-arm prior to their Valentine’s Day 1959 departure for Europe, where they’d happen across a baby. The baby now wanting to share this moment with them.

I didn’t get out of the car. There wasn’t anything to see. I had hoped to place my hand on the house in which I was born, give my life some mortar, as cracked a foundation as it was; a symbolic scintilla of certainty for all the lack of certainty that had followed.

Expectations unraveled into a dead standstill of desolation on a windswept vacant parking lot. This was my first “home”. This was my “foundation”. My father would’ve laughed. My foundation was his Uncle’s home – the United States Army. The irony: this was where his transcendental moment happened.

My heart swung like a pendulum. Mein Geburtshaus had disappeared without a trace like the forgotten baby boy. No sign we were ever here. The day had gone nowhere. I had no time for emotion because I had a hungry, tired family.

Don Quixote was wise not to bring along a family. It would’ve halted his crusade. So, who then is the mad one? I had deceived myself, chased an inanimate object, saw only ghosts. Then again, maybe I wasn’t so insane when I convinced myself marriage and a family would add to my life. This moment proved (again) that they were my transcendental moment. My journey lead to my family. They represented my victory and now they were hungry.

My father was born in Welland, Ontario. He never returned, got to know it. Yea as a kid he played pond hockey; that is until a puck broke open his forehead. But that was in Utica. I don’t know where I found my love of hockey but by 1990 I started visiting Canada to see professional games.

Fantastically friendly people, I knew that from teammates, who had immigrated south. Canadians can be in the shower with a bald guy and ask with total sincerity “you got any shampoo?” (Who can make this shit up, especially when you’re the bald guy.) Canadians are that natural; that funny.

Now over a decade living in New England I own Canadian property. In 2006 we did our annual July camping vacation with the kids in Nova Scotia. We’d check out the parcel, since I bought it online.

As usual, we forgot that we’d have to camp with campers. It became obvious once again that people who camp for vacation are those people who can’t afford hotels or they are not allowed in them.

Campers have fortitude though. They drink into the night around the camp fire. Without much entertainment, fire is trumped by stargazing. Stargazing then conquered by beers. It gets louder, rowdier, cutting into the quiet enjoyment of other campers.

It’s no different in Canada as the States, except for the accents. But that’s not why they’re so naturally funny, even when riled, ready for a fight.

And so it was as the piercing morning cry of an unhappy toddler, cut through the thin vinyl tent walls of hung-over adults on air mattresses. I was clutching that wailing toddler when some angered anonymous Scottish-Canadian accent yelled into the dawn “MIND YOUR BAY-BEE!” To my horror suddenly another anonymous brogue replied, “SHUT YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH!”

What a volley! Prickly Canadians, they’re as funny on ground as on ice.

Hours later a medium-sized, muscular mustachioed man in a ratty, faded ball cap approached me. I knew it was one of them. Demurely his brogue spilled, “I just wanted to apologize for my foul language this morning. “Those assholes give NO-va SCO-tians a bad name”, as he pointed nowhere.

Keeping a straight face I accepted the apology, explaining my toddler’s mother “went to the showers. She hadn’t slept well” (leaving off that she was kept up by all of you last night).

One would think they would be considerate of children. Kids were running wild all over the campground.

A majority of the campers were vacationing from homes less than five miles down the road. Winters are long. Canadians have space and they need space. Their kids were running, swimming, biking, screaming – mostly unsupervised throughout the roads, playground and pool.

One young man in particular madly peddled through the dirt roads, braking, power sliding, kicking up rocks at cars, campers and tents every day. Confidently on his BMX he played chicken with moving cars. Unwittingly he was a Canadian Dennis the Menace; Canadian kooky and cocky.

I responded though like a foreigner.

I chastised him after he damn near catapulted head-long into tents. Later that day walking from the office, he saw me and ran over, “you’re American, uh?”

I agreed.

All of ten years he asks, “what’s it like being a Super Power?” I hesitated a reply as he added, “my dad said you’re going to be fighting wars a longtime.”

Chuckling, I stopped. I said, “you’re dad’s a smart man. I think he’s right.”
With that the kid nodded and ran off.

I thought of him today. I wonder what his dad’s telling him now.

My hope is that Canadians never lose their sense of humor, energy and comfortable innocence. They have an acute sense of proportion, perspective. It’s simply tough living with some neighbors at times.

Maybe marriage is really special. Certainly it’s still held in high esteem.

Not a week since our sixteenth anniversary, I’m still receiving the loveliest notes, congratulations. But please, I know people who’ve been married longer than many of my current friends’ have been alive.

These people scoff at sixteen years. They see it and double down on us. Some sent us congratulations.

I think I see why those old friends scoff at any marriage celebration under twenty-five years but I’ll admit it from my short experience, I don’t know what all the hubbub is about? Maybe they know this as well.

It seems from a distance that their marriages are on autopilot. Perhaps that is how you achieve 35 years together? I feel we’ve hit stride, maybe because I married later in life; maybe it’s really more about aging.

I don’t know if we’re quite on autopilot but we move across a floor well. In tandem. A team and as arduous as it is, it feels easier than when we were younger.

Surely every day holds new challenges, constant anxiety, doubt.

Then you have children, which compounds and complicates your union. But as I stand in the walk-in closet of this century old, depreciated seaside home, marriage feels right; more than simply putting another 20 years on my life. Together, we always work it out, get by somehow; that is how the others have possibly made it.

I look down at my bureau. The Queen’s looking back at me stoically. You know, that portrait of the Queen on Canadian Notes. Sturdy unlike my house. Regally confident, unlike how I often feel. Clearly seeing what’s ahead for us all, while I can barely see pass the end of each month.

She reminds me of how far I have come and how I should chin up and feel proud. In fact, she reminds me of a night decades ago, maybe it was Windsor, Ontario; perhaps it was Montreal. My girlfriend at the time and I were on a nice holiday.

She had accepted my request to marry one night yet we hadn’t set a date and by the next year, she ran off with an art student from Philadelphia. She returned. We were trying it again.

Anyway, she was at an ATM in the vestibule of some bank in one of those fine cities when I heard a terrified scream from inside. I dashed in from the sidewalk to find her standing, hands to mouth, as if punched in the stomach, yet more horrified.

“What is it?” “What’s wrong?” I implored bent at my waist trying to look between her hands into her twisted face. She cried, “the machine stole my money. My money’s gone”. I reached to my right, pulling out 300 dollars in fifteen denominations of twenties, Queen staring gracefully a glance.

“You’re in Canada!” I said. “It’s real money! What did you think you were going to get?”

I forgot all about that night; lucky I didn’t marry her.