A Letter on Your 55th Birthday

Dear Schuyler,

Our daughter, Micah, asked me,

“Daddy, if you could have one wish, what would it be?”

I mull this over and over again. I want for nothing.

And, now, with your 55^th birthday here,

I feel the same loss for answers.

It’s as if it is the same question:

When the material world has little to offer,

what do we want to receive and what do we want to give?

So, I’m on a walk alone. The same one we do.

We’ve been yoked for 37 years,

You can’t fit any more Jill Platner around your narrower parts.

You have enough yoga leggings to swaddle the Taj Mahal in lycra.

You’ve denied my generous offering of a libidinous threesome. A number of times.

Hence, in this forced monasticism, I will resort to what monks do;

Rake the pea gravel by the sauna.

No, I am going to etch you this love letter.

And like a true guru, I’ll make it barely comprehensible to enhance it profundity.

I don’t subscribe to determinism. I believe we chose each other.

And if your corroding memory serves you,

the all-you-can-eat buffet of women was once amply stocked;

Daphne, the olive-skinned marine biologist, Nurit, the sturdy Israeli park ranger,

Sydney from Sydney, Susie, the well-heeled equestrian.

Yet none of them held a candle to your culturally-appropriated corn rows,

talc-y leotards, high-cheek boned aloofness and immaculate chastity.

Your vulva was the Kingdom of God

For there was more chance of a camel passing through the eye of a needle

than a rich man entering it.

Our springtime was dewy with daring chivalry.

A see-sawing of lover and beloved,

An unbridled romp across campgrounds and far-flung hostels,

Just to end in the place that we started

And know it for the first time.

As Elliot wrote, what we call the beginning is often the end.

You boxed up my tattered boyhood and, thankfully, buried it.

I sought in you an absurd collection of archetypes;

Nurturing mother offering her soft breast

And lithe nymphet capable of whimsical handstands.

Also offering her soft breast.

Capable feminist bread winner and occasional wanton Jezebel.

Breast still applies.

Despite the lack of script, your thespian pedigree has served you (and me) well.

You have played each character with aplomb and warrant nominations for numerous supporting roles.

The world anxiously awaits your next casting: nurse.

Together, we have dispelled any notion of commitment as limitation.

The bedrock of our unconditional mutual pledge has allowed us to take madcap risks and follies, knowing, that in failure, there is comfort.

We have known that commitment is freedom without once uttering it.

I suppose, until now.

You’ve been stalwart across the decades,

Steadfast in your manner and ways.

A stable port from which I have launched ships,

Some seaworthy, others plagued by scurvy.

I, on the other hand, have provided you a great assortment of husbands

in one single betrothal.

From hippie troubadour to French rapper,

from yoga mogul to British aphorist,

I offer you an abundant variety of lovers.

It’s as if you get to remarry every couple of years without legal hassle.

What a gift my insecure and fickle psyche has afforded you.

Like a tart cherry jam, you are remarkably preserved.

Decades later, you appear the exact same … from a carpark away.

Your impeccable physique is tantamount to income inequality.

Your undeserved sinew undermines any measure of meritocracy,

As if underpaid migrant workers are chiseling your abdominals

While you read the same New Yorker article again and again.

I deeply appreciate your prudishness

For how else would I maintain such a fertile imagination

Which, to your credit, you entertain, often for minutes at a time

As we drift off to sleep, only to wake up to pee

and then brood over delinquent tenants till dawn.

We have never fought much. I’ll take most of the credit

For sweeping your irascibility under the rug.

I even delivered three consecutive X chromosomes

In order to avoid a conflict over circumcision.

You would have agreed to a briss in the end

Not just because you’re too vain to tolerate a sheathed penis

But because, despite being a Taurus in a murti shop,

You always find the grace to let me win.

I am in love with your self-love.

You don’t need the approval of others.

Across 55 orbits, you’ve suffered but one fool.

He who requires regular deep-issue ego massage.

You have earned perhaps the greatest status of all in that

You are respected by those who you respect.

Yes, those two people.

And you are largely reviled by the rest.

While I wax poetically every day

You wax pathetically infrequently

Leaving 3 pubic hairs curling over your impossibly low-slung jeans,

A look that is now under review by the US patents office.

We transact well.

Our love is not the rapturous, intertwined passion of teenagers

on a park bench that it once was.

We’re more connected paper clips than a double helix

Free to go our separate ways,

until the curved edges of our union pull us back in line.

It’s an officious type of middle-aged tenderness.

I love you. Pass the hole puncher.

As usual, my gift to you is really a gift to myself

as I sit here sipping espresso, writing,

making myself laugh, losing track of time.

But isn’t that the way with all expressions of the heart;

Forgiveness, charity, and acts of compassion.

Giving is to be in receipt of presence.

And further unveils the illusory nature of self.

I suppose I am you.

Not just because our gnarled tree trunks have fused together.

But because our essence,

impervious to the vacillations of space and time,

is not separable.

We are just sculpture here.

I thrust my golden arrow into your heart.

You lie with your head thrown back

In a state of transcendent bliss.

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.

This was the epiphany

that closed my faithless adolescence

and opened my manly devotion to you.

On my best days, I still feel this way.

Dreamy, not altogether of this place.

I want to tear you away from this dull care

And walk and talk

and do nothing and leave nothing undone.

Our daughter, Micah, asked me,

Daddy, if you could have one wish, what would it be?

She can sense I have an answer now.

Could it be a trip to Disneyland? Or a Pomeranian?

Perhaps a new trampoline? Or any car other than a Prius?

Micah,

I wish your mother and I,

a long time from now,

will die on the same day.

I feel guilty giving her this macabre answer.

But what her mind cannot grasp, her heart understands easily.

She gives me a hug.

I forget that she is closer to God than I am.

In eternal love, include me,

Jeff