David (February 26, 1938-May 26, 2009)

David was the only person there will ever be that knew everything about me. Most of it he lived with me, but the part he didn't, like my early childhood and young adulthood, he knew everything I knew, as I knew about him. Nobody can wholly know me ever again. Being with David was like being with myself. Being without him is like being with myself. There's no difference between life and death except that in life I can sometimes forget, and get very sad. Last year I went through "David Season."  This year I was only sad for a week or so. It's such an irreplaceable loss, so it will have to go unreplaced.  I'm caught on the razor edge between the chasm of the past and the chasm of the future, where I was born, where I met David, where I lost David, and where I'll die.  The Precipice of Me.  Where everything is perpetually new as I confidently and timidly stride, crawl, dive, trip and fall into the future.

As I mentioned in a previous post I met David when he poked his head in a hole between a wall of books I was hidden behind and asked me, "Who are you and what are you doing?" Clearly, a strong connection was made at that moment, but had gone unrecognized at the time. I was living with my boyfriend, Wil, and David was married. I soon left town and Wil and David met, became good friends and Wil started working for him, and staying with him and his wife on their farm. When I next got back in town (Dallas), Wil picked me up at the bus station and drove us out to David's land in Hubbard, Texas, where we stayed a few weeks. I think Wil was between jobs (we traveled and went wherever he could find metal lathing work (he was a third generation metal lather), and I worked for Kelly Services, a temp agency, wherever we went).

I was a northern city girl, I had never been to anyplace like Texas before. David's then wife took me to a dairy farm, and had me dip into the vat. That was the first time I saw the layers of milk and fat, and realized what cream really was. It was also the first time I tasted real milk. It was the first time I tasted real beef, too. There was a chain of steakhouses that served $2.99 rib-eye steaks so good they melted in your mouth. We never tired of them when we were in town, but Hubbard, Texas was out in the middle of nowhere. Once we saw a mysterious object zigzag across the sky and stop dead still. David got out his telescope and set it up on a tripod. We watched it for a few days but it never moved again and one day we noticed it was gone. I think this was 1974.

Wil and I eventually married, eventually divorced. David got divorced also. I thought of David as Wil's friend rather than mine, because they would write letters to each other, but David and I didn't keep in touch. Neither David or I could ever remember how we got back in touch again but we floated around in each other's lives for years before we became close friends. This picture was taken soon after I met him, maybe 1977? He would have been around 35 and I would have been 11 years younger.

 
Around 1982 he was living on his sailboat getting ready to sail around the world alone and I couldn't bear the thought of that. I kept finding things in my apartment for him to fix (by this time we were both living in the same town), and the thought of him sailing alone across the sea bothered me so much he never left. We went through a phase he liked to call "leaving a sleeping bag behind my couch." That year we almost adopted a baby together. A friend knew a pregnant woman that wanted to give up her baby, but the mother changed her mind when she found out we weren't Christian. David didn't even want kids, and was cranky about it, and we weren't even married, but he would have gone through the adoption with me anyway. He would have done anything for me.

More moments in which he stole my heart: When he broke down and sobbed in my arms for the first and only time. When I saw him gently brushing Mellie, my long-haired cat whose skin was too sensitive to let me brush her. When he announced to a group of dinner guests that he had married me for my salads. When he credited me with humanizing him. When he presented me with a purple heart (a real one he got from a junk store). When he refused to bring me flowers but would get me laser light bulbs with flowers in them, like these:

When he started taking the same classes as me and never studied and got straight A's it really pissed me off. Until he told me how he was treated so poorly at home and school that he had always thought he was stupid. David was discovered by the English Dept. to be a world class poet and fawned over by the school administration and the most prestigious of the faculty. Our nothing little lives suddenly blossomed with local culture and we were privy to all the campus gossip and political upheavals of the inner circle, a fascinating subculture in itself. And each department had its own dramas. David interviewed all manner of local celebrities for the school and wrote an essay for an English textbook the dean was publishing, for which he actually received compensation. He started a scholarship club, and was the first president of it. I myself won some writing contests, one for which David was a judge. He assured me all the other judges had also voted for me.  He often helped grade papers, tutored and mentored.  He instituted student photo ID cards. He set up the photo booths, took every existing student's picture, made the cards himself, and did so for every registration after that until the school was able to take over the system so no students were missed. David got both an AA and an AS degree, and was there about 4 years, and a part time employee for the college. I was there about 6 years because I kept taking classes after graduating. We both felt those were the happiest years of our lives. And we were divorced part of those years, too. Yep. David had some kind of mid-life crisis and divorced me. But divorce really didn't change things, and we eventually annulled our divorce. That's how we thought of it, not that we re-married, but the divorce just didn't work out.  (By the way, David and I were never unfaithful to each other.  In fact, he divorced me so as not to be unfaithful.  How fucking noble of him.) And it gave me an opportunity to be single again, and boy did I use it.  As depressed and angry as I was that the prick divorced me, I had the time of my life.  We both did.

His first really big emotional breakthrough happened watching a concert video with me.  We had very different taste in music, but every now and then he would hear something and tell me about it, and would be amazed that I could not only figure out what it was from his meager description of it, but actually produce it on some old tape I had made off the radio, or some old vinyl or CD.  I lost Graceland, Jennifer sings Lenny and my entire Phil Ochs collection this way, and with each loss I would gain a new husband. The first few decades it seemed that I was humanizing him (hence earning the purple heart). But the last few decades it was David that pulled me out of my black hole. Our favorite movie had always been Flashdance, but David's new favorite became "What Dreams May Come." That movie, as much as a watercolor painting as it is, is too real for me. It depicts a husband's journey to hell to get his wife back. I should have given him the purple heart back. He didn't live long enough for me to think of it.

Our song was Sometimes When We Touch, by Dan Hill. I had told him one day that I heard Dan Hill doing it as a killer duet, but never got around to acquiring it. I don't think he ever heard it. Well, David, here it is. Is there youtube in Heaven?

1981ish:

Our wedding photo, Valentines Day, 1987:

This was taken on our honeymoon.  He had a way with animals:

1998ish in our first and only home of our own (which we lost a few years later when we both lost our jobs):

Here he is by the pond he built and was very proud of (there were live fish in it and sometimes a frog), with our cat and chicken, 2007ish:

Here we are growing old together.  It was taken on our 22nd anniversary cruise 3 mos. before he died.

I barely noticed David. He was the rest of me, my mirror, my guru, my protector, my confidant, my partner in crime, my savior, the wind beneath my wings and the floor under me, and I never took anyone more for granted. He was always there, there was no imagining life any other way, so I didn't imagine it. When he dropped dead two years ago today it was unimaginable.

I never wrote a poem about him. I guess we just lived the poem. This is the only poem in which he's mentioned, but it isn't really about him. It's about waiting at home in light pollution while he was in New Mexico building our house (the one they could never take away), bathing in the open air and watching the stars while I stayed home in the daily grind, joyously anticipating the day we could move into our newly built house, alone together, miles away from anybody.

Milky Way

I washed the dishes and
changed the cat box sand
You took a shower in water
welled up from our own land

I made soup, folded laundry and
wondered why the pond went dry
You mistook the milky way
for clouds floating across the sky