Point of View: More Time, Please

We’re almost on the eve of our 30th anniversary, and I must say it’s gone fast.

I say that with a certain wistfulness — though with some relish too insofar as my missteps have been concerned. Thankfully, there’s barely time to recollect them.

Thirty years ago I was a bit lost, trying in the wake of a misalliance to strike it up with solitude and sanctity before finding life again with her.

“I remember seeing your books . . . Thomas Merton, more Thomas Merton, the lives of the saints, Thomas a Kempis . . . very monkish, I thought. . . .”

“Heloise and Abelard too. . . . You know what happened to him.”

“And then I saw your records. Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, James Cotton. . . . And I figured you couldn’t be all bad.”

“Our timing was serendipitous — I was beginning to think an examined life was not worth living!”

“I wasn’t all that sure in the beginning that it would work out, though I told people afterward that you were the first man in East Hampton who waved to me. . . .”

“On Abraham’s Path, I was running.”

“It was Windmill Lane. . . . I also remember telling Georgie and Johnna after they trashed your house when you had us over to dinner that night that it was a good thing I wasn’t serious about you.”

“Only persist. I’m so glad I did.”

The world has been too much with us at times, of course, though in those moments when, blessedly, it has not, we’ve found ourselves on the wing, sentient, laughing, and free. Whether we’ve been sitting on the porch, the deck, or in the kitchen.

And there have been many of those awakened moments, I’m happy to say — when our minds, bodies, and souls have been delighted participants in the creation. And of course, being mortal, I want more.

Before leaving with our daughter for Costco this morning, she asked what I might want, and I said, “More time.”

“We have some, I think,” she said on her way out. “Look in the cupboard.”

I did, and there it was!