Before the idea of sex captured you, what did you wait for? It was the stuff of children, you included, crossing out the calendar’s Sundays and Mondays leading to birthdays, holidays, and visits to the amusement park.
The anticipation of gifts filled the time, coupled with the unimaginable prospect of 365 more days until the celebration came back for an encore performance.
Expectations made one irritable, restless, and eager, like a race runner on the starting blocks and ready to go.
Despite awareness of the long delay, the concrete, oversized bricks of time stuck to their slow slog toward whatever fulfillment lay ahead.
As I grew up, other matters became worth knowing, meaningful and necessary in a very different way.
The knowledge of how I arrived in this world was among them.
I asked my dad; of course.
Yes, the sex question.
He responded:
I planted the seed.
That’s a quote, by the way. Four words. Fake news of a sort carrying an indecipherable truth.
Thrown by the answer, I pictured corn and beans and all sorts of vegetables grown by farmers. Did a family farmer produce me too? I thought my dad worked at the Post Office!
Did his children arrive in the mail, sent with a spear of asparagus?
It took me a while to recover from this confusion, delaying my sexual development by a decade.
Love came, but I also learned about how it can disappear.
Affairs of the heart sometimes grow stale with routine. Just as the psychologist tries to make each session new, the passion of the early days of romance demands renewal. It is best sustained when the couple works to keep the enchantment fresh, a bliss that makes us smile.
My folks didn’t have that problem. They knew what it meant to be separated.
They experienced an interrupted honeymoon phase of their relationship when my father was drafted into the army after less than three years of marriage. Two and a half years passed before his return from the war in Europe.
Dad made a recording for my mother while away, and his recorded voice aches with tenderness and desire. His letters, too, carried those emotions.
He rushed from the dock when he returned with a boatload of troops from France to New York City. His first call was to her, the one.
Such stories of war, waiting, and reunion repeat the tale of Odysseus, the inventor of the Trojan Horse. After ten years of fighting to breach the walls of Troy, it took him another ten to reach his kingdom of Ithica and his wife, Penelope.
She remained faithful, putting off the pursuit of many suitors for her affection and riches.
Milton Stein told me about his own Odyssey in 1986, 40 years after he heard Jeanette Stein’s telephonic voice, his speech breaking with a wave of feeling as overwhelming and alive as it had been on March 6, 1946 — as alive as they prayed he would be.
He had waited for her in every sense, every part of him, as did she wait for him.
Most of us have homecomings of one fashion or another, seeing again those friends or relatives we missed. Sometimes it is our hometown or country itself we have longed for.
Do we know how much we miss anything — until we miss it; how much we love anyone until we are separated and in doubt?
The time we hold our breath has its way with us unless we transform it and squeeze tight the foreshadowed vision that makes us wait. Whether for Christmas, the amusement park, our family of origin, or an endlessly delayed reunion with the love of our life, we hope for this, we live for this: the never-guaranteed next time.
Just as a gifted therapist works to defeat the routine to which weekly meetings are susceptible, we all have the opportunity to make life’s fleeting moments special.
Learn patience, and bridge the terrible time and distance while dreaming of the gifts those efforts reward. They will fuel your ardency and gratitude.
My dad never gave me a clear answer to my childhood question of how I came to be.
I didn’t realize he would do better much later.
The tears in his eyes in 1986 told me all there is to know about love.
