The Past, The Present, The Future

She loves him. Cannot visualize what her life might have been like, without him. Cannot see the future without him. No future. Just a vast chasm of nothing, an empty, forbidding solitude. Bearing no resemblance to the life they've had together. A life of mutual discovery, pleasure, sorrows and forbearance. But always together, each supporting the other.

They take comfort in one another. Born of long familiarity, the predictability of the order of their days is the medium of their comfort in large part. But it is far greater than that. Her emotional appreciative, loving attachment to him. He can speak for himself, and he does, often. Not one day goes by out of the hundreds of thousands they have spent together without his speaking of it.

He has always been impetuous, responding to situations and to people at the moment, giving little consideration to the weight of his response, how it might impact on others, and often it did, deleteriously in the sense that he would give offence. For he is always frank and forthright. Even more than that, as a male given himself to taking swift offence.

Seldom with her. Never any harsh words. Puzzlement, perhaps, at her own swift condemnation of some of his adversarial male responses to others sharing the road, when he's behind the wheel of a car and his sense of driving responsibility has been affronted by the careless neglect of other drivers. When they were young she worried.

Thought that some large disaffected male taken umbrage at her husband's clear denunciation of his driving ability, with a license received through a correspondence course or in a box of cereal, elicited a similar aggression. Her worried imagination saw her husband injured by a furious thug driving a car. Now it's called road rage.

When they were young - and they were very young when they first met - it was as though, on her first seeing him, that she recognized him from her yearning adolescent night-dreams of a companion who would share her interests, her vision and values - whatever those were - of the future. The initial attraction was hers alone, and she pursued him.

They married young, set off on their own at an age when most young people today are still attending school. He had, in fact, graduated high school, while she had not. And he took correspondence courses afterward, in business administration, psychology and forestry, of all things. She admired his educational aspirations. She pursued her own continued education on her own, reading voluminously, omnivorously.

But then, so did he. They had even joined a book club, although their combined earnings barely covered their living expenses. And when they eventually had their first child, and two more followed in fairly rapid succession, he proved his mettle, learning how to change diapers, bathe an infant and feed them as well as she did. They lived in genteel poverty on his inadequate salary, but life was full and it was good.

Their days of carefree adolescent were behind them, though they were still very young. They still remembered dancing to the music they loved, songs like "Tonight You Belong To Me", "As If I Didn't Care", "Young Love", "Answer Me My Love", "Life Is But A Dream", "Love Is a Many Splendoured Thing", Teenager In Love", "You Belong To Me", and "Unforgettable".

It was as though those songs and many more were written especially for them. They were fast friends and constant companions for four years before marriage. In that time they did many ordinary things, although everything they did together seemed extraordinary, imbued with a taste of heaven, from embarking on long walks in area parks, to viewing films, and attending teen dances.

They were each, singly, outside the little groups of the 'in crowd'; cliques of the admired and the socially privileged. Both tended to be loners, although they did enjoy the company of others. They were, at one and the same time, introverted extroverts. Choosing when they would share gregarious events, and when they would extricate themselves from the presence of others.

They experimented, when they could, in discovering one another's intimate body parts. The first time she saw him naked and aroused she was both fearful and impressed. Firstly, by the sheer youthful beauty of his musculature, and his pride in himself as a male. Her female pride was far less evident, she was forever certain she lacked voluptuous femininity.

Much later, when their children were grown, became adults and moved on elsewhere to complete their own lives, he spirited her away to a foreign country where they would live for a while. It was exciting, exotic, and compellingly fascinating for her, much as she missed the immediacy of her children. It was, indeed, as though they were experiencing a second life.

And much later again, when they returned to their country of birth and settled back down to the kind of domesticity they were comfortable with, they both continued working until he decided it was time to retire. Retirement, for him, simply meant not embarking each day to an office job. It most certainly did not mean idleness.

And his brain never rested. As much as she loved reading, he was equally committed and could in fact, read two books to her one. He would read for entertainment and instruction. To fill his mind and memory with memorable historical events, appreciation for the wide, vast world, and to cultivate a keen interest in the visual and plastic arts.

His hunger for knowledge and his determination to follow through on anything that drew his interest impressed her beyond belief. His constant and constantly-changing interests fascinated her. As he mastered one element of construction, or artwork for example, he would move on to another. It was never sufficient for him to merely know how; he had to reproduce as well for full satisfaction.

It wasn't just his industry and his creativity that awed her, but his tender regard for all living things. From an earthworm that he would carefully return to a safe place when he helped her dig into her gardens, to spiders he would rescue from their home to the out-of-doors rather than dispatch the creatures. He would bend to pluck a caterpillar off a woodland trail and set it aside for its safety.

A routine developed where twice each day he would meticulously sprinkle handfuls of raw peanuts in their backyard for the chipmunks and squirrels whose habit it became to drop by. Above all, the way his face would crease into an affectionate smile, the way he would crush her to him, the way he would rush upstairs from his basement workshop in exuberant response to an old song played on the radio, to dance in the kitchen with her.

Their hair was grey, his had thinned, and his once-robust physique, though still evident, had slumped, while her conformation had altered alarmingly, though neither was overweight. She still sees in him the youthful braggart who assured her he was two years older than her, when he was not. He still sees in her the slender young girl with the almost-flat chest and warm smile.

He is life's gift to her. A lifetime of priceless gifts.