Point of View: One More Tango

Our cat taught us how to die, leaping into the vastness, the slugs, taking their own good time, taught us how to love, and Henry Haney may have taught us how to live when he said life was what you made of it — in other words, that we could be the agents of our salvation. 

At least that’s how I understand him. No church to lean on, no secular liturgy, no manual to be consulted for the fashioning of ourselves — which is good because I am not good at following instructions. 

So we make it up as we go along, trial and error, stopping every now and then to take stock, asking ourselves what we want to make of it.

I was confronted with such a question some 34 years ago. What were my intentions, Joe Gordon’s son wanted to know, when it came to the woman with whom I’d come to the Giffords’ party. For, if I was serious, he said, he wouldn’t continue to press his friend’s suit. 

Yes, yes, I was serious, I said, in my diffident way. I liked her, I liked her very much.

 And still do, so much that on leaving the store that has Robin’s painted cards, of birds, often pairs, and flowers, this afternoon, the sadness which I guess is always underneath welled up, and I stopped for a moment, aching and thinking could we have one more insouciant moment, one more tango in Zihuatanejo. 

The birds on the card face each other, a couple, balanced and content, amid red, orange, and yellow leaves. 

Suspended so they seem to see clearly that it’s eternal and momentary. 

There was a time before we had spirits, and bodies, and this time now, the happy occasion of our 33rd anniversary, when we face each other and toast one another, a pair of birds amid red and orange and yellow leaves.

That’s what I make of it.