[Final Draft]
“He likes to argue, doesn’t he?” Julana asked.
“He was on the debate team in high school. It’s hard sometimes…” Cheryl responded.
“Hard?”
“He always has to have the last word.”
Julana looked over at Michael. We were having a farewell dinner, September 2019, before they left for another six months in Spain with their daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law. Each time we saw them, we didn’t know if it would be the last.
Michael stroked his beard, his smile lighting up the dark-paneled restaurant. “Why’d you join the debate team?” he prodded. “Trying to pick up girls?”
“Funny you should mention it…” I replied. Strobes of long buried scenes flashed up through my past, burbling out to be told. “I did meet my first girlfriend, my first real girlfriend because of that.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Really?” He looked over at Cheryl. “Did you know about this?”
She laughed. “That’s what he tells me.”
Michael turned back to me. “I bet there’s a story there…”
One I hadn’t thought about, much less told, in years – decades, maybe. I felt the embers re-appearing from underneath the ash pile of my history.
Two girls, Carol Downs and Susie Wise, appeared one night while the team practiced for our up-coming regional tournament. Our advisor, Miss Flory, let them in to her little apartment.
“They wanted to be our cheerleaders,” I told Michael. “They made these timecards, paisley fabric glued onto small white cardboard. They thought the football, the basketball teams were getting so much attention. But since our school was college prep, they thought the intellectual competition of debate deserved equal treatment. So they wanted to be our timekeepers.”
“And where did that go?”
“Once I finally figured out that Susie was interested in me, we started going out, and kept it up throughout college, until I went to USC for medical school. Susie had one more year at Radcliffe. I stayed in LA, she stayed back east.”
Julana looked at Cheryl. “That’s where he met you, right?” The subject changed, and we shared our origin stories as couples. Cheryl and I flirting on the night shift on the LA County Hospital labor and delivery unit, Michael chasing Julana to Kentucky after getting a fleeting glimpse of her at his brother’s house.
I’d seriously reminisced of Susie only once in the previous 35 years, ever since I learned of her death at age 35 from leukemia. Memories of her drifted far below my conscious thoughts until I went to Boston in 2005 to race the marathon. I visited her grave, had a good cry, wrote a story about it, then heard no more from her memories. Until Michael asked that question. Over the next five months, she pounded on the door I had closed over her, insisting I pay attention to her story, get it out of me and into the world.
********
The next month, I prepared for the Hawaii Ironman, mid-October. Following that, back to the triathlon grind for Ironman Arizona, mid-November. My brain had no bandwidth for the past, only the immediate future of finishing my triathlon career on a high note. I won my age group in Tempe for the 4th time, securing a ticket back to Kona for what I planned as my absolute last and final Ironman.
Returning from Arizona, I plopped in front of the TV, and watched the latest Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime. In it, John Kasinski and Wendell Pierce traveled to Venezuela, CIA agents trying to reinvigorate the democracy there by ensuring a female candidate for President would stay alive and win. Midway through the seventh episode, as she leaves her house the night of her victory, the candidate, Gloria Bonalde stares in wonder as her driveway fills up with supporters, cheering the overthrow of the defeated autocrat. Her two children trail behind, shepherded by her chief aide Valentina, played by Columbian actress Paula Castaño. They are seen out of focus in the background several times for a split second as the camera shifts from Bonalde to what she sees. Then, another quick take features Valentina and the kids, in full focus, smiling and nodding in wonder. Castaño appears ready to cry with joy. She is wearing a simple white top, covered by a gray pants suit. Her dark, wavy hair is parted on the left. At the instant of her mouth opening, I caught a sudden rush of Susie’s image careening back into view. The eyebrows, the shape of her cheeks, the set of her hair, the smile of wonderment and knowledge – she was there once again in my mind.
And she wouldn’t go away this time. As days went on, I kept remembering who she was, how accomplished she had been, how lucky I was to have known her, to have her teach me. I didn’t know it right away, but she began demanding more and more of my attention.
********
In the winter, Cheryl and I spend many evenings in front of our Vermont Castings Reliant stove, warmed by a fire from logs I have split the year before. In early December, we began discussing love, how it happens, why it leaves. I remembered a poem I had written about that, five decades before. I searched for the folders which preserved the writing I had done in in my late teens and early twenties.
First, I checked under the sink in the mud room – I had not stored them there. Next, down in the basement, on metal shelves next to my collection of old skis and discarded Christmas decorations, I found the yellow cardboard container, and brought it back upstairs.
Sifting through the box in front of the fire, I found it filled with forgotten memories. Not only poems, but papers I had written in college, sporadic attempts at journaling, a few newspaper clippings, and other detritus of my past I refused to discard.
I had burned the letters Susie had written before we parted, but discovered several I’d saved from after we split up, along with one or two which escaped the fire. And a letter from her mother to mine, after Susie’s death, sketching her last few years. These along with the journal entries ripped off the encrustations my brain had placed over Susie, and she escaped fully into my consciousness.
I began to think about her, unbidden, at all hours of day or night. I began to see bits of her in any woman with long dark hair. I began to wonder, What am I supposed to do with this, these poems I wrote to and about her, these letters she sent after we ended our love, these messages I scribed to my future self about what happened and how I felt back then, November 1965 to September 1970.
I found a birthday card she had created, a sheet of colored construction paper. She sent it from spring break in Cincinnati, 1970, after visiting me while I spent that winter skiing in Snowmass. Her tiny writing filled every inch not covered by a collage of pictures cut from ski magazines. She listed every secret phrase or joke we’d shared, every place we’d shared. She acknowledged her love for me, even though we both knew we were already separating.
I’d saved other little tidbits from her. Four poems she wrote to me when we first got together. Comments on a clipped “Ask Ann Landers” column. A ticket stub or two from plays we’d seen. It was all too much, and I started crying, not knowing I still had those feelings left in me. It was not nostalgia; it was the actual return of her into my life.
While Cheryl and I spent those December evenings by the wood stove, cheering and warming ourselves through the dark, damp drizzerable season surrounding the holidays, she read her books, browsed the internet, and luxuriated in the heat. I pawed through that box, reading and re-reading the poems, letters, and journal jottings, creating cascading thoughts about the five years I spent with Susie. Inside my brain, those thoughts had no landing lights, no place to settle and attach to a story I thought was finished.
As the New Year came, and holiday excursions no longer saved me from the growing obsession, I frantically tried to stop the intrusion. I felt possessed by her, or at least the memory of her face, her laugh, her love. I wanted those thoughts gone back to wherever I had buried them, but I couldn’t find the cemetery they’d escaped from, no headstone or open grave to guide me back to sanity.
The first week of January, I tried writing her out of my thoughts, transferring what I remembered to document and preserve her spirit on the page, where it could live outside my mind. My plan: put it all down on “paper”, and I could return to it when I wanted, knowing it wouldn’t leave. I got two chapters in and lost the plot immediately. She consumed my thoughts in a way nothing ever has before.
Since the mid ‘90s, I had been documenting my daily physical “activities” – training exercise, workout, it’s all the same. First on an Aspen photo calendar and in a small reporter’s notebook, later on computer apps. Looking back on the first quarter of 2020, there’s a gap in the recording I did in a training diary, from January 16 to February 23rd. I know I kept the activity up, as my smart watch faithfully kept track and uploaded the data to Strava. But the training diary I wrote in every day – the only other gap since 2007 was after my bike accident in fall 2010, when I was physically unable to either do any training or write on a keyboard. This obsession with a long-dead girl had crowded out my other life, threatening my sanity.
On January 12th, I checked out a therapy site I’d heard advertised on NPR the day before – BetterHelp.com. I signed up and several days later I got the courage to request an online visit with a therapist for the following week.
A few days later, while Cheryl and I were preparing dinner, I got a mysterious urge to hear the Bob Dylan song, “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.” Susie and I had each brought a predilection for Dylan into our relationship. More than the contemporaneous Beatles, his combination of social justice anthems and oddly evocative love songs resonated with each of us. That evening in the kitchen I searched for it on Apple Music. After hearing Dylan’s version, I clicked on another which appeared in the list, by someone I’d never heard of, Kesha. She gave a dirge-like rendition accompanied only by a cello, her voice continually cracking as if she were on the verge of crying.
I heard the words for the first time from a woman’s perspective, specifically as if Susie were trying to explain to me what she was thinking and doing when she drove out with me to Los Angeles as I started medical school there. That she was willing to travel cross-country with me I see now had given me subliminal hope that we might be able to continue a long-distance relationship. In retrospect, that clearly was not on her mind. She literally got out of our bed and left me behind. “You’re the reason I’m traveling on. Don’t think twice it’s all right.” She had given me her heart, but I wanted her soul, Kesha was telling me.
That song appeared on an album called Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International. Four discs holding 76 covers by artists as well known to me as Joan Baez and Jackson Browne, and as unknown as Kesha and Darren Criss. As varied as Ziggy Marley, Adele, and Johnny Cash. Dylan’s songs new and old flew past as I scrolled the list, and randomly lit on one I didn’t know, “I’ll Remember You”. I see now that choice was not random, the title was exactly what I was doing. Thea Gilmore, along with an acoustic guitar, stand-up bass, and lonely trumpet, started out, “I’ll remember you when I’ve forgotten all the rest”. From the end of life, looking back at all s/he’s known, she sings “Though I’d never say that I’d done it the way that you’d have liked me too, in the end, my dear sweet friend, I’ll remember you.”
I began to think my obsessive thoughts were not coming from within but brought in by some cosmic link reconnecting me to Susie. My hold on reality, on the belief that I controlled my thoughts, my actions, began to loosen. Over the next two months, while I skied in Colorado, baby-sat our granddaughter (who was born on Susie’s birthday), and kept busy training for the upcoming triathlon season, I continued to get messages from other songs, images from other people who resembled her which accelerated the disruption. I eventually decided to live with the mild insanity, cancelling the therapy appointment.
I spent a few days alone in Snowmass skiing and listening to maudlin music. I started compiling those songs into a table of contents for a massive story I would tell, about winning and losing Susie and then finding Cheryl, how all that created the person I have become. I tried explaining this to Cheryl on the phone, but I kept leaving out anything related to the girl who came before. It was very important to me to not lose the most important person in my life, my wife of forty-some years, my best friend, and the mother of my children.
I was scared. Scared because I was not in control on my own thoughts. I had two choices: either I was going crazy, or I was being visited, haunted, by a ghost. I chose the latter, even though a part of me strongly suspects that is not possible. I made that choice because it was too scary to think I was losing control of my mind.
Back home, being around Cheryl again brought stability. We spent a week in mid-February skiing with family, and I felt grounded once again. Returning home, as the drum beat of the novel coronavirus increased and people began to question the risk of their daily routines, I threw myself into a neglected project, compiling blog posts of my early triathlon journey into a book for sale on Amazon, I Really Wanna Go To Kona.
All this activity had failed to completely silence the external voice in my head. Not one I could hear as if it were speaking, but one that was trying to possess me, to insist that it had a story to tell, and needed to get it out in the world before I was no longer able to help. I could see the entirety of the tale, knew how it started (those paisley time cards), how it proceeded (Susie left me), and how it ended (she died.) The day after I clicked the button to publish my Kona tales, I started writing.
I began on March 8, not in my own voice, but in that of Susie’s, our relationship told from her point of view. I have no explanation for why that happened. But once I switched perspectives, once I let her tell the story, the words came easily. Everyday, as the country began to shut down, I sat at my computer and wrote for 60 to 90 minutes, a thousand words or more, chronologically from November 1965 to May 1984. The last fifteen years I could not rely on my own memories, only on the few letters I’d saved, the brief note from her mother, and scientific articles on which she had been a co-author. Those fifteen years flowed as easily as the first five, and I was done in mid-August.
Along the way, I learned as I never had before who I was. I learned I was lovable. I was reminded about the foundation of a loving relationship, the ability to give up oneself in favor of a new duality. In April 2022, after editing, pruning, and refining, I publish Love Rhymes. I ended it with a poem, thanking Susie for what she brought me twice in this life.
