Dig This

"The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles."

Ralph Waldo Emerson


That one slapped me around a bit.

My love for Carol is stronger and deeper than it has ever been. I have arrived in my heart to where I am supposed to be.

Maybe it shouldn't have taken so long but, then again, I think the kind of love you feel after over thirty five years together, takes over thirty five years to realize.

Savvy?

Now that I am there I have to make her believe it.

She is leery of me because I am unbalanced in the cranial area. I am unhappier now than I have ever been in the work-a-day world, and I am not the kind of guy who can slap on a phony smile.

At home.

Which is cruel and ironic. At work I have to fake it to make it. Faux cheery conversations with customers, pretending that nothing is wrong. Although even there I slip once in a while. Go through the motions in muted expression, head hung, staring at the goddamn register.

I let it down even more with co-workers; sometimes I just shut down, don't talk, or talk despondently.

But again, even there, I am forced to make the effort to pretend that I am just the happiest goddamn guy on earth.

The customers and the co-workers do not deserve that effort.

Carol is the only one that deserves that effort.

But I come home and clam up because it just takes too much energy to pretend.

Self image complicates the matter as well. Carol feels she is not the young, attractive woman she once was. She succumbs to society's pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of beauty.

She doesn't understand that her beauty is soul deep. That everything we have gone through in over thirty five years has resulted in a beauty that is uniquely hers and that I am the lucky beneficiary of.

The physical shit doesn't mean a goddamn thing.

Believe me, I have no plans to ever take my shirt off in public ever again or even in front of any other human being. And Carol still loves me.

I think.

The love we have is amazing, in my opinion. If I can just up my game a little and meet Carol half way, that love would flash like lightening, it would illuminate our souls and fill our hearts.

It would get us through.

I have to translate the knowing into the doing.

She deserves that.

She also needs to understand that she is the the source, she is the honesty, she is the instrument upon which the music of our love can be best expressed.

Just as she is.