Timeline

The year that we met our lives together
began. We were fourteen, and together
exulted in doing all the things that young
people peering over the horizon into near
adulthood pictured themselves involved in
yet from the perspective of mere children
launched our future as holding hands
we went together to see films of the day
walked in leafy, sheltered urban parks
and talked endlessly about ourselves
about life, what little we had experienced
of it, knowing more through what we read
as omnivorous bookhounds, and yes, went
together to local libraries. Met with friends
and in groups went to beaches, watched
sports events, attended school plays, went
to endless community center dances
and spoke on the telephone to the grim
irritation of parents, eating up hours of
telephone lines and time. By the time we
reached seventeen, convinced life apart
would be no life at all, we window-shopped
for material goods that we would need to
set up our household, aggrieved that parents
failed to share our enthusiasm for an early
marriage. But when we were eighteen it
took place, not as we might have wished
and expressed by eloping, but as our parents
commanded, an elaborate planned affair
attended by people we barely knew, relieved
by the time the evening ended. Our first
child at 24, two more to follow closely
and life as we would know it presenting
itself in all the complex, dramatic, joyful
permutations we could never, ever imagine.
And nor could we imagine at that distant
time there would be another time far into
the future when we would look back in
disbelief at all those years, long passed.