In My Life...

I’m waiting, like everyone, more than a little impatiently, little sweetheart, for spring to come. It’s still bitter and blustery, even as the sun tries shyly to poke his head around the clouds and cheer things up a bit. It’s Monday and although she’s at a conference this week and we’re not meeting, it is usually my day to see the woman who’s been counseling me since your passing. She’s all the way over on the Upper East Side and there’s no good way of getting there better than walking. It’s a nice walk, especially in clear weather. I walk up past Columbus Circle to Lincoln Center before heading east through the park, past Sheep Meadow, down the steps to Bethesda Fountain, turning at the Boathouse toward the Lagoon and back up to the street on the other side just before reaching the playground there at 5^th Avenue in the East 70’s. That last stretch is a little curve, my sweetheart, a kind of pedestrian intersection of two divergent paths with park benches around the periphery – the perfect spot for buskers, for street musicians, to set up camp. There haven’t been many braving the harsher elements these past few brutal months, but I find myself thinking today of a pair of them I came across on my weekly trek once last spring. Most of the year there had been a young guy there paying muted trumpet over a backing track of classical accompaniment on a boombox. He’d solo over the top of it. You could hear him from a good distance and, even muted, needed to steer not too close as you passed up toward the street rounding the corner. I got used to the routine. But this day, I think it might’ve been in June, I heard instead, guitars and singing. I was a bit disappointed, to be honest, at first. As I got closer I recognized the song. It was a couple - a kind of young hippie-ish looking guy and girl, him on guitar, her on fiddle – singing The Beatles’s In My Life. The harmonies were sweet and spot on but what really impressed me as I drifted past was how they tackled the bridge – him earnestly downstroking through the chords in rhythm, her navigating every tricky turn of the harpsichord solo. On violin! I looked back from the corner, stopping to hear them finish the song – their angelic voices together, their earnest, unspoiled faces, him beaming, she the picture of concentration – and I turned and walked back.  I put a fiver in the open guitar case and said “that was fucking great.” I think that startled them at first. But then I saw their look of surprise turn to gratitude and friendliness. “Thank you”, he said as she nodded a bit shyly at his side. And ya know what, sweetheart? I never would have been able too see any of this if it weren’t for you bringing such a gift of love to my life. You grew my heart, my darling. You taught me what love is. What love can do. What love can truly be. True Love. And in these moments, my little sweetheart, I so strongly feel you with me. In my life, indeed…