Consolation Champs

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost

It was the first week of February, and I had been away for 9 days in France, at a short film festival. It hadn’t been a particularly good trip. I was socially awkward and intimidated by the French language and the very professional and cliquey nature of the crowd. I’d stayed too long and missed home. And so I came home, and something between Brooke and me was just slightly off. When you’ve known someone nearly 20 years, you know when things are slightly off.

Later that week we went out for dinner and it seemed like Brooke was trying to pick a fight with me over the continuing joke/disaster of my “career” (or more accurately, my lack thereof). I knew it was one of our issues, but it didn’t seem to be that big of an issue. When we got home, I pressed her to tell me what was really the matter. And then she collapsed into tears.

Through sobs, she told me that on the night I left for my trip, she’d gotten together with an old university friend for dinner. He was in town for a conference and they’d decided to catch up. She’d briefly told me about her plan on the day I left, which seemed odd because she mentioned it so offhandedly at the last possible minute. What I didn’t know at the time is that this friend was someone with whom she’d had a brief flirtation way back in 1992, but she’d been involved in a serious relationship and so they never pursued it. He found another girlfriend, studied law, got married, had four children and now had a very successful career as a Crown Attorney in a small town about five hours from Toronto. But he shared with Brooke that he was unhappy, and that he’d always “carried a torch” for her. And I guess this unleashed her own feelings of regret and “what if?” She confessed that they had spent the night together. Even worse, they were planning a long weekend together the next month which is why she was trying to fight with me. She admitted that she was hoping to manufacture a crisis so that she could say we “needed time apart” so she could be with him. I was completely blindsided.

But I wasn’t yet angry or even very fearful. I thought it wonderful that Brooke was getting flattered and told how desirable she was. She’s a very attractive woman and sometimes it’s good for your self-confidence to have someone (other than your spouse) tell you that. And over the years, I’d had my own silly flirtations and attractions and could understand that feeling of infatuation. But it quickly dawned on me that this was something much more serious. Although I decided to let things play out, thinking the infatuation wouldn’t last, I have to admit that letting her spend an entire long weekend at some hotel in our own city with some unknown guy did crush me. But surely she’d get this out of her system and see that what we have is worth keeping, right?

Except that that hasn’t happened yet. And I don’t think it’s going to happen. I hastily made plans to escape to Montreal for a few days in early April. When the time arrived, I was miserable and didn’t want to go to another city just to be alone. She informed me that he was going to take advantage of my absence to spend a few more days in Toronto with her. Another horrible few days for me. And when I got home, I didn’t know what to expect. I kept telling her she needed to decide, but have finally come to the conclusion that her actions have spoken louder than any words. She’d already decided. She’s chosen him over me.

And I’m devastated. Anyone who knows me well knows that I take my relationships more seriously than just about anything in this world. I certainly take them more seriously than my “career.” I’ve put every ounce of my strength over the past nearly 17 years into being the best boyfriend, and then the best husband, that I knew how to be. We didn’t have a perfect relationship. No one does. But we had a damned fine one, full of love and affection and great communication. I love Brooke and I loved being married to her, and so this is the hardest thing that I have ever had to face in my entire life.

Though we haven’t yet decided to divorce, Brooke will be moving to her own place on June 1st. Strangely, it’s just across the street from our current apartment. And I’ll stay here, at least for the summer, though the effective doubling of both of our rents is going to be harsh. Maybe I’ll turn our office back into a bedroom and try to get a roommate. Or maybe I’ll move to another part of the city, though I’ll need to share a place and I have no idea what that will be like. To top it off, I’m still woefully underemployed and will need to bring in a lot more money just to keep going. But really, that’s how it all started for me.

It was almost to the day 27 years ago that my mum died. I was 22, just finishing college and hoping to embark on my career. But life got in the way, you see. My dad’s support cheques stopped coming, and I ended up staying on at my summer job much longer than I wanted to. Then followed a period of taking in roommates, sometimes too many at a time, to make ends meet. I often feel that my career restlessness is somehow rooted in this “work for survival” period of my life. Hopefully it serves me well again now.

I’m familiar with grief. And with struggle. Hopefully I can find the strength and resources, within myself and with my friends, to come through this okay.

That was my semi-ironic title for the piece the Globe and Mail published on February 8, 2013 on the back page of the Facts and Arguments section. At least that’s where I think it appeared. I was out of the country and only saw the online version. They changed my self-deprecating title to the more desperate sounding headline “I’m a reading prodigy, but now I’m falling behind in life.” Wow, that really sounds dire. Still, I’m proud of the piece, although I was asked to add 200 words at the last minute, while Brooke and I were on holiday in southern California. I hope you can’t see where the padding is. This is not the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’m still proud that it was published in “Canada’s National Newspaper.”

I was also delighted to receive some fan mail the other day. One piece was a card from the 91-year-old patriarch of the Cusimano family, still living in the same house on Cassandra Boulevard, and who sent me two photos of his family: one from the 1960s, roughly around the time they appear in my piece, and another of the extended family in the present day. The other piece of fan mail was from a septuagenarian from BC who encouraged me to remain a free spirit, to live my life to the fullest and to regret nothing. What amazing gifts! Here’s the piece as it appeared:

American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass famously said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

I have not found that to be the case.

As a child, I was a bit of a celebrity.

When I was three, I found my way to the local elementary school and asked to be let in. They told me I was too young, but, after telephoning my mother, allowed me to sit in on their kindergarten class for the day.

I found it a bit slow.

You see, by the age of three, I had already taught myself to read.

I am not sure how I accomplished it.

We had a lot of books lying around, but the only one I can remember now is Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.

By the time I had started school for real, it was hard to keep my ability a secret.

One time, on the way to school, I was stopped by a couple of the rough-and-tumble Cusimano boys.

One of them had a paper route and rode a special bicycle with a big metal container on the front full of newspapers.

I recall them pulling one out and asking me to read the headline aloud, and then, amazed, the rest of the article.

Early in my school career, I was asked to come to the principal’s office – not because of any misbehaviour, but to demonstrate my gift.

Mr. Malcolm took a book, seemingly at random, from his office bookshelf and asked me to open it to any page and begin reading.

A few days later, I found myself moving from Grade 1 to Grade 2, right in the middle of the school year.

Looking back at my report cards, I find it hard not to laugh.

My Grade 1 teacher called me bright and inquisitive.

But by the end of the year, my Grade 2 teacher had lamented that I was immature and that some of my stories were “silly.” I was seven at the time.

Classroom reading exercises in the 1970s involved ubiquitous boxes of SRA cards.

This ingenious system made learning a game, allowing individual students to progress through each of the dozen or so colour-coded levels independently.

We’d read a story contained on a large card and then answer questions to test our comprehension of what we had just read.

Of course, because I already knew how to read, this stuff was easy and fun for me.

We also had the Scholastic book club, through which we could order books at school and have them delivered to our classrooms each month.

I was very glad to discover that this is still going strong.

I also loved when our teachers would read books aloud to us.

I can sometimes still hear the voice of Mrs. West in my head whenever I read one of my favourites, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

I continued to excel in school and, unbeknownst to me then, my parents rejected the school’s advice to skip me another year after Grade 6.

They were concerned about my social development, and it turns out they were right.

By Grade 8, I was tired of being called a “brain” and helping everyone else with their homework.

I wanted to be accepted, but I didn’t want to stand out.

My report card that year warned that I appeared to be holding myself back.

I got a further comeuppance in high school, where it quickly became apparent that math and science were not my strong suits.

My childhood ambitions of becoming a surgeon or a biologist started to fade.

But so what? I could do anything, couldn’t I? And there’s the rub.

If anything, I think being able to read from such an early age spoiled me.

Having the world open up through books might seem like a wonderful thing, and when I was a child, it was.

But as I grew up, and continued to feel like the world was forever opening up to me, at least through books, I became more and more restless.

I have been part of the work force now for more than 30 years, starting with my first summer job selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.

But I’ve never held a job longer than four years, and any grand idea of building a career, never mind a vocation, has long since evaporated.

From time to time I blame the new economy, or the Internet, or the rise of unpaid internships.

But the truth I cannot avoid is that I think I’ve always just been an intellectual nomad.

I have been spoiled by reading.

My head has been filled from toddlerhood onward with the magic of worlds created by words.

To this day, I cling to the illusion that if I am sufficiently interested in a subject, I can make a career there.

But the truth is that I am still the daydreamer I was as a child.

Back then, they thought I was just bored with the standard curriculum.

Perhaps it was simply that the real world could never compete with the world I found in books.

Perhaps a better quotation about reading would be George Bernard Shaw’s, about the slightly ridiculous “hero” of Cervantes’s novel: “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.”

Oh, and the Cusimano boys? All doctors and lawyers. One is even, if you can believe it, a brain surgeon.