Dearest Rachel –
It wasn’t until I sent that letter about last night’s (this morning’s?) dream that I realized what day it was. Between all the traveling I’ve been doing – combined with the subsequent jet lag and so forth – and the fact that I don’t exactly answer to clock or calendar means that I rather lose track of days as they go by. Yes, as I mentioned yesterday, I need to be a part of them and experience them, but I don’t keep as meticulous track of which one they necessarily are, especially if they doesn’t require any action on my part, like a reporting or payment deadline.
So when I tell you “happy birthday,” please don’t be offended that I hadn’t prepared anything to mark the day. Although, I’d like to think that, at this point, you might be hoping that I had gotten past it; there’s no sense in continuing to brood over you like Poe’s lost Lenore, after all. It would certainly be one thing were you still here; the liberating thing about my circumstances (and the fact that you and yours brought me to them) is that we could have made a big deal out of it – although, now that I think about it, we never really got the chance. I retired on Daniel’s birthday, a little more than a month after yours, and barely nine months later, the barriers involving Covid came down. There were no big days anymore; nowhere to go, no way to celebrate. I forget what, if anything, we did that day. Which is a shame, as it would be nice to be able to remember how we spent your last birthday. But I don’t; I assume it must not have been much.
To be fair, I think we may have done carryout from the conveyer belt sushi place we always used to frequent in order to celebrate at home. And while there’s something to be said for such a thing (and it does prevent us from going overboard, to a certain extent, on our ordering), it’s certainly not the same sort of event that the whole process of ‘going out’ is. But it’s not as if we had any options at the time; life wasn’t back to normal. Indeed, it had just barely started to be something other than ‘normal’ at this point – the phrase ‘the new normal’ was just starting to come into vogue, as the “fifteen days to slow the spread” had already grown to two months, with no end in sight. At least with the take-out business, it looked like the Sushi Station was going to weather the storm (and, of course, it did), but it just wasn’t the same.
I can’t remember a single thing that we did that day or evening. I would sort of assume that, for your sake, we watched a few episodes of Doctor Who that we needed to catch up on, but I can’t confirm anything like that. I know we couldn’t have anyone over to celebrate with you as you turned fifty, but it was always assumed that there would be other times, other birthdays. It’s what we expected of life.
But life sometimes throws a bit of the unexpected in there, just to see if we’re paying attention. And I suppose we weren’t; so now I’m left putting these pages together day after day, just in case a day goes by that might be important, that I won’t want to forget. But it does me no good for all those days that I never bothered to write anything down about – which basically amounts to all of our days together.
I suppose it’s just as well; had I taken that kind of time to write everything down, that would have just been time not spent with you, and would have been no better than any other sort of distraction that I already indulged in back in the day. It might make me feel better to be able to review it now, but it would have taken away from the moment we were in, and you would have received no benefit from it, as there was no benefit to it until one of us was gone – which we never counted upon happening, or at least not so soon.
I wish there had been more birthdays, more time spent together. Which probably goes without saying, really, but I can’t seem to help stating the obvious.
Ironically, since it works out better for everyone than, say, the weekend, the gang is all getting together today. If nothing else, I’ve got to catch some of them up on my trip, as well as passing out all the souvenirs I collected (and paid handsomely both for luggage and the extra fee to bring it all home). I still wonder what the day would be like if you were here as well; I wonder what’s been done in the twelve hundred days since that would have remained the same if you were here, and what would have changed. But, I suppose that’s all a moot point.
Have a happy birthday, honey. Keep an eye on me – when you think of it – and wish me luck, as I’m going to need it.
Letters to Rachel 