No More “Month of May”
Where have all the shared stories gone?
We had not seen each other in almost 60 years. She lived on the West Coast, I on the East. Only rarely did memories of her ever come to mind. At my age, naturally, a good many of my friends and former colleagues have passed away. Yet to learn of her death — as I have just now — leaves me feeling…words seem inadequate…. “Distraught and devastated” will have to do.
Why do I feel so…? I wonder. And then I remember: In the spring of 1965, she was “My Girl.”
I’ve got sunshine, on a cloudy day
When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May (ooh)
I guess you’d say
What can make me feel this way?
My girl, my girl, my girl
Talkin’ ‘bout my girl, my girl.
But by the time other songs pushed the Temptations off the pop chart, our young romance began to sputter, then abruptly stopped (why exactly, I can’t recall). After college, there was never an occasion to see each other again. Subsequent girlfriends, not to mention more than one wife, inevitably diminished her place in the story I created of my life. She was never totally forgotten, but also never in my conscious thoughts. Until now….
Finally facing my own inevitable demise, I confront the long, slow process of triaging — sorting, then discarding or keeping — my lifetime’s flotsam so my survivors won’t be burdened. From a stack of file folders floats a neatly typewritten note with a photo attached, dated April 5, 1999, postmarked Seattle, Washington. It had been forwarded to me at my office in Virginia by a considerate New York Times editor and a conscientious mailroom clerk. The letter reads:
Sitting across the breakfast table from my now second husband, I read your article on the Virginia Piedmont…. If you’re the same person I knew from college days, your nickname was “Buddy,” and you called me “Patums.” You smoked Lucky Strikes and liked to play Hoyt Axton on the jukebox….
I’ve enclosed a recent photo. I hope the years have not distorted recognition…. (They had not!)
If you are this person, you can contact me at 206-xxx-xxxx. (I never did. Did I try? Did I intend to, but then forget?)
So now, 25 years later — and 59 years after our college sophomore year — I pick up my cellphone and key in the number. The line clicks, immediately goes dead. Usually there’s a recording of some sort saying the number is no longer in service or whatever. That would be understandable; after all, the number I’m using is a quarter-century old.
I then turn to the Internet — searching with both her maiden name and the married name she had used in the letter. Then suddenly she is dead. My discovery that she’s dead happens instantaneously as the search function defaults to “death notice” and “obituary.” I don’t learn the cause of death, only that it happened almost exactly a year earlier, in the fall of 2023.
Why do I find this news so devastating? My original question remains. At our age, death should not be surprising. As the future fades, only the past remains; that part of my past is now no more should also be unsurprising.
I can’t truthfully say that I miss her. I never knew the woman that she became, the “her” that died. What I miss, of course, is our youth. The youthful, hopeful us. Most of all, I realize, I miss our shared memories.
It is her letter of 25 years ago — a memory of a memory — that brings tears of loneliness and loss. With memories that can no longer be shared, and thus validated, now it’s as if I must silently speak a language that’s gone extinct. As in today’s America, with ever fewer stories that we share and call true, we shout past one another in foreign tongues. And we cry over what’s been lost.
###
