All in all, things are pretty terrific. Sure, we won’t be going home for Christmas this year – the pandemic – and for the first time, ever, will not spend Christmas with our kids. But we have no complaint spending the winter here in southwest Florida. We are both healthy, retired, and still in love. Yes, life is pretty terrific.
We decide this morning to go to the beach; it is a fifteen-minute drive from our condo. There will be, as always, few people on the section of beach we visit. We shall sit there, the melody of the waves hitting the shore a constant symphony. Meanwhile, the car’s radio is playing easy music when Pachelbel’s Canon begins.
We listen in silence for a bit and then Gretchen says, “That’s the music from Carl and Janie’s wedding.” My same thought, of course. I always think of their wedding when I hear that piece. And as usual, though forty years have passed, I am right there, standing at Carl’s side as his Best Man, Janie a beautiful bride with flowers in her hair and Gretchen, lovely in a blue dress, in front of us performing the ceremony, a local judge behind her to make it legal.
We are a special foursome, wonderful friends. Every few years we are together. Golden times. Absolutely golden. The times of our lives. We simply assume they will, as Carl wrote to me, “go on seemingly forever.”
A phrase from Robert Frost’s Birches, “when Truth broke in” interrupts my reverie; the inevitable, which awaits us all, ended the foursome. Then the final line of Frost‘s short same-titled poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay.
First appeared in Round Table Literary.
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