I knew that it was time to get out of Savannah when I almost (purposefully) sent tourists in the wrong direction. A friend of mine, an economist, tells me that Savannah has more tourists per capita than in any city in the United States other than Orlando, and I believe it. I have given many strangers (correct) directions and helpful suggestions, and I have patiently waded through people blocking the door of my office building, where they have congregated to take pictures. I have even refrained on cold February mornings from telling the group that surrounds the seersucker and straw hat-clad tour guide that no one actually wears seersucker and a straw hat in 40 degree weather. But last Sunday afternoon, I kept hearing a honking and slightly intoxicated voice behind me, braying again and again, Have you figured out yet how to get to the river? I had no idea that it was directed toward me until someone grabbed my shoulder and said, I said, Have you figured out yet how to get to the river? I turned to face a family of four in full-on Confederate regalia, and as I did, I contemplated just how delicious it would be to send them on a two-mile trek south instead of a two-block stroll north. Fortunately for them, Chris — kind, sensible Chris — was with me, so I smiled politely and gestured north to the promised land of frozen drinks.

I read recently that wanderlust may have a genetic component, that the desire to get out may very well be locked in one’s DNA. So get out I did,  and spent five nights in five different cities: Tuesday/Cincinnati, Wednesday/Savannah, Thursday/Tybee Island, Friday/Tallahassee, and finally on Saturday, coming to rest on Saint Simons Island for a week-long vacation.

I had gone to Cincinnati for work, and in the time between court on Wednesday morning and my flight on Wednesday afternoon, I wandered around the city. After having a surprisingly good lunch at a French restaurant — is Cincinnati on the left bank of the Ohio River? Maybe. — I walked into a contemporary art museum that I had passed on several prior trips. I was worried; I had 20 minutes before I met my airport shuttle. But it was free, and when I asked exactly what I should see in my 20 minutes, the young woman at the desk said, Make sure you take in our fourth and fifth floor galleries. (To be fair, those were the only two galleries in the entire museum.) I boarded the largest elevator I had ever ridden — an elevator literally the size of my dining room — and after it lumbered upward, the doors opened on this sight:

Readers, I will offer this observation: Before you send a hapless tourist into an enormous fluorescent room populated with 48 life sized lounging models of clowns, you really should warn her. Clowns! The artist did a masterful job — and perhaps “masterful” is entirely the wrong word, maybe “terrifying” is more appropriate — of making the clowns look lifelike, to the point that I found myself waving my hand in front of one’s eyes to see if it would blink. But no. After having more than my fair share of the clowns, which is to say 37 seconds, I reluctantly rode to the fifth floor to see what horrors awaited me, saw the single painting hanging there (a giant spiral), and left.

Who knew that modern art could be so cruel?

The next night I found myself in some friends’ beach house on Tybee. We arrived before they did, and after a few hours of walking, lounging, and raiding the dog-eared paperbook book selection that every proper beach house has, the four of us went to a nearby bar and restaurant for fish tacos and a drink. The sign outside promised a show at 9 p.m., but this was an insufficient warning for what we actually saw.

I think I can reduce my expectation to a simple equation: “Show” + “bar and restaurant on Tybee Island” = “dude with acoustic guitar singing Van Morrison and Jack Johnson covers.”

I did not expect, say, a venerable Savannahian-turned-Hollywood-publicist announcing to the assembled masses that we constituted the most sophisticated crowd in all of Savannah, all of whom were about to see a New York cabaret show. I knew that he could not count on me for the “sophisticated” part — after all, I had recently recoiled in horror at the high-concept modern art clown exhibit — and when I looked around, I was not so certain that he could count on anyone else in the room, either.

I will try to be kind, so I will say only this: There is a reason that 60 year-olds do not give vocal recitals, or if they do and are not related by blood to me, that they do not invite me. The singer had a certain fondness for ingénue songs, and while I like to think that we’re all eternally young, it would be a more convincing endeavor (at least in my mind) if age-appropriate music were involved. But that’s just me, the one who was tempted to jump up and sing “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley!” just like the Sweeney Sisters skit from Saturday Night Live.

I resisted — just barely — and after eating the most expensive (psychologically speaking) fish tacos I had ever consumed, I walked outside with my friends, only to find the dude who sang the acoustic covers packing up his guitar. The experience was surreal, at least to my unsophisticated tastes, and as I write, I wonder if it was all a piece of performance art.

I do not think so.

Friday found us on the road headed to Tallahassee, the site of my aunt’s house and a family reunion in miniature. (I say this because very few people could come this year.) We listened to “S-Town” on the way over, and it is compelling in strange and equal measures. Chris and I stayed in the neighbor’s house — an Airbnb special — only to find that our bedroom and the adjoining bath had no door. None. (I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.) But this oddity aside, I spent time with two aunts, an uncle, three first cousins, and three first cousins once removed. Everyone looked alike, enjoyed margaritas, and occasionally burst into song — my tribe if ever there were one.

Late Saturday morning, I found myself standing in the middle of my aunt’s kitchen, surrounded by three blood relatives — my aunt, a master gardener; my uncle, a gifted carpenter; and a first cousin, a talented painter and metalsmith — and I had such a sense of belonging. I think that sometimes I get too caught up in looking relentlessly forward that I forget to glance back behind me or even around to my side. But there they were; my family remained despite my failings. My aunt insisted on giving me a vase that belonged to my great-grandmother and a setting of Fiesta Ware, the brightly colored plates that my grandmother, a woman who helped run the family’s hardware store, considered her good china. The last 40 something years have not diminished my love of the color of those dishes and the freedom they represented, for nothing ever had to match (or, to be more accurate, they matched only by mismatching).  My aunt stacked blue, green, and yellow together, and at a thrift store on Monday, I found an ivory Fiesta Ware creamer from the 1950s for $3, a good omen indeed.

And now Chris and I are sitting on the back porch of the cottage on Beachview, where we have spent time for the last five summers. He is reading, and I am writing. I have painted, including this view of my surroundings:

I have also started on a portrait of Chris, a painting I have tentatively titled: “This May Lead to Divorce: Amy Lee Attempts to Paint Chris.” (I refuse to show it to you, but trust me when I say that the preliminary take looks like the love child of a Neanderthal man and the character from the game “Operation.”) It is a treat to spend time at a place both foreign and familiar, and the anxiety switch powers down faster here than anywhere else in the entire world. There are constants on this trip — walks on the beach, lots of sleep, a little bad television, sitting on the porch, riding bikes everywhere. We straddle (and we straddle well) a fine line between engagement and boredom, relaxation and utter sloth.

Outside our little world, every trip features a bicycle rider looking too far ahead and missing the obstacle in the immediate path. Every trip features a visit to a boiled peanut purveyor who foolishly asks what size serving we want. (Large. Duh.) And every trip features wanton consumption of barbecue at our favorite place, a converted gas station with outside seating under a carport. It is an excellent place to people watch, and Monday, in pouring rain, perfect people about our age sat on the picnic table next to us. Seriously, they looked like they had stepped off the set of a Viagra ad, like he should have been commanding an impressive sailboat while she gazed at him longingly, wearing only a slightly oversized football jersey. I stared. I watched them with their well-lasered and injected faces, their immaculate clothes, their perfect tans, their utter maximization of their bountiful genetic gifts, and my hand involuntarily flew to my soft belly, then up to hide the lines on my forehead. The counter help called out the woman’s name, something too classy and perfect for a fellow child born in the 1960s, and she raised her hand. A single salad appeared in front of them, and they began to share it.

At a barbecue joint. On vacation.

I appreciated their virtue and their commitment, I really did. It is good to get a reality check about what it takes to be perfect. At that point, the young waitress walked by, pink hair wet from the rain, towel in hand to try to dry the benches. Sweetheart, I said, for I have begun calling servers who remind me of our children sweetheart, could you please take our picture?

When cameras operated with film and the image was precious, the shooter got a single shot. But the young woman depressed the camera phone’s button and took and took and took. When she smiled and handed the camera back to me, there were dozens of photos of Chris and me, almost all exactly alike of two imperfect tourists who had not been sent the wrong way to the river. And it was good.

ALC

One of the nice things about having an elderly large breed dog is that it gives you plenty of time to really get to know your vet. Except for one notable exception, every veterinarian that I have ever met is all kinds of terrific: patient, kind, compassionate, and covered beguilingly in dog hair. I have known several local veterinarians, all thanks to my insistence on a fairly rigorous Quadrant System, a self-imposed four-sided region that constitutes my Savannah: bordered on the north by the river, on the east by Skidaway, on the south by Derenne, and on the west by Montgomery. The southern border gets breached weekly — curse you, Publix — but I mostly stay within my square of town. This explains my saying good-bye to a few vets I loved (and one I very much didn’t) and finding Dr. M, a new one within the Quadrant.

On Buddy’s first visit to Dr. M, I saw a sight that very much summed up what I think it means to be a vet. An imposing man was walking slowly out of the office, carrying a large bundle wrapped in a sheet and sobbing. I watched him kiss the bundle, place it gently in the back of his equally imposing truck, and sit behind the wheel, first crying, later collecting himself, and finally starting the ignition.

This is not exactly the best omen for one’s first visit. But God love the person who has the generosity of spirit and intestinal fortitude to end a beast’s suffering, offer comfort to a bereaved owner, and then perform a rectal examination on a not exactly thrilled 100 pound Saint Bernard/Golden Retriever mix and make a previously missed cancer diagnosis.

Buddy and I found ourselves sitting again in Dr. M’s office yesterday afternoon. For the first time ever, I was feeling pretty self-congratulatory after Buddy’s weigh-in, for he had lost 17 pounds. To be fair, this garnered a 17 pound loss from my psychic well-being: Buddy acts as if he practically reels from hunger, as if he would shank me over the smallest remnant of pork. It is tough love in action, and the fact that the new vet can now feel — not see, but feel — Buddy’s ribs is small consolation.

But I was also feeling a bit worried, thanks to a stubborn, recurring, and increasingly nasty infection in Buddy’s left eye. It began shortly after his episode in the neighbor’s koi pond, and all of those Nancy Drew books I read in my youth led me to believe that the two might be related. The short answer was “maybe.”

As in, maybe it’s an eye infection. Or maybe it’s a tumor behind Buddy’s eye. (I initially thought that the vet’s reference to a tumor was to a brain tumor — an eventuality as likely as my being diagnosed with testicular cancer. But no.) The answer, my friends, is in Buddy’s response to a course of antibiotics. So far, he has taken eight out of 56 pills. I cannot tell with any degree of certainty whether he has been getting better, which I am pretty sure means that he is not. There may soon be another new vet — an ophthalmologist — and a whole lot of uncertainty in our near future.

I have not cried about this latest development as much as you might think. It has struck me that perhaps we all teeter between minor irritation and major catastrophe, and that when faced with this wild swing, worry is such an ineffective response. Buddy certainly isn’t worried, a fact that my favorite non-Quadrant vet reminded me of after his cancer diagnosis. You just have to make the most of your time.

To the end, I have worked very hard lately to put down the &%$* phone and rot my brain with more constructive and engaging pursuits, like television. But even watching television often finds me looking into the cradle of my left hand, the phone exerting the force of a tractor beam. There is so much information to be had. What else has that actor appeared in? How many seasons has this series shown? What do the critics think? This always leads to a brisk trot to social media to see what my friends are eating for dinner, to my work email to ensure that there was been no crisis, and then to a few other sites just because they are there. The phone tends to be on a rest and repeat cycle, rest and repeat, so I try to turn it off and otherwise occupy myself.

It is too hot to knit in Savannah in June. My sister would laugh at this proposition, because there was one evening in late June, probably clocking in at a balmy 92 degrees, where Chris decided to serve piping hot homemade chicken soup. If my sister has ever been hotter, I don’t want to see it, and her eyes shot sweaty daggers in my direction during the meal and beyond. (I haven’t asked her, but I think it took the better part of three days for her body temperature to regulate.) I will occasionally get a text from her announcing that it is soup weather, and it delights me. While soup weather may be a fun time to inadvertently torment my sister, it is a terrible time to knit.

That leaves painting, and for the first few weeks, I set up an easel in the back of the living room. No one — least of all the most extroverted member of the family by far — liked that solution, so I now sit on the floor, back to the chair in which I used to sit, torso conveniently close to Chris’ foot for the occasional gentle nudge. There is a hazard: Buddy’s failing vision often brings him terrifying close to a palette of paints and the canvas itself, but so far we have avoided disaster. I sort of listen to TV while I retreat within, and lately I have been thinking of a conversation that I had with my mother.

My mother wondered recently what my life would have been like and what I would have done if I had begun painting as a child. Would I be an architect? A painter? A designer? Could I have maximized my potential? It is tempting to go down that road, and if anyone loves a Plan B, it is I. (I have noticed that my imaginary Plans B feature great wealth, fame, and fabulous clothes, which perhaps explain why I love them so much.) I have realized, though, that the discovery of painting came at exactly the right time: I am happy, I have looked at a lot of art over the past 49 years, I love color, and I am unafraid. It is a perfect storm, creatively speaking. My first painting is my favorite, because it felt like such a gift. (The amount of wonder and passion that it has inspired confirms that it is. For exactly how many times do I surprise myself these days? Very rarely.)

Last night, my daughter brought her own painting into the room and sat near me on the floor. She is the real deal. She has taken art lessons forever and now attends a high school with a strong visual arts program. She has a lovely graphic style that is both realistic and fanciful. And to prove that it’s not just her mother talking a big game, here is her Mother’s Day gift to me:

But sometimes with the deadlines and the requirements of school, it gets to be burden for her. She threatens to quit; she pushes aside projects. I was so happy last night to have her on the floor, painting something strictly for pleasure. She kept complaining that my right knee was in the way of her left leg, and I kept thinking how much I enjoyed being able to sit that close to my 18 year-old girl. I tried to be as still as I could to linger in the moment, and maybe it was no surprise that I began painting a picture of this bird’s nest that I found on the street outside my house:

I had an art teacher who thought it mortal sin to waste paint, so I began the underpainting with the oils I had on my palette:

Brush swirling, I had everything I needed: Chris close by, my daughter’s foot touching my knee, the dog snoring on my other side, a host of bright colors. The phone was out of reach so I could not (again) Google DOG EYE TUMOR. The movie on television was inane and funny, and the air conditioner hummed cheerfully along. Time passed quickly, and I kissed everyone good-night. Chris first. Then our daughter, a kiss on the top of her head where I could smell the familiar sweet sour tang of her hair. I kneeled down and kissed Buddy’s head, too, and while he did not smell nearly as good as the others, his musky scent flooded my nose. He was here. He was fine. He was not worried.

And neither was I.

ALC

P.S. — My daughter came in as I was writing. She rarely reads my blog and asks me to tell her the story instead. I did, and she believed that you needed to see what she was painting last night, too. I agree. Here it is, the beginning of a gecko rendered in acrylic:

 

I have lived 30 minutes from Tybee Island for the last 25 years, and until recently, I very rarely loaded into the car and made the drive. It may be because the first thing I ever saw on Tybee was a large woman wearing a star-spangled thong bikini, twirling a baton and somehow leading a Chihuahua on a leash through discarded boiled peanut shells near the beach. (There are some things you simply cannot unsee, and that, my friends, is one of them.) It may be the traffic, which is beastly and surprisingly dangerous on summer weekends, thanks to an old two-lane beach road winding through the marshes and populated with people in a terrible hurry. It may be my skin tone, which is slightly lighter than a sheet of copy paper and which carries the need to apply liberally a sunscreen with an SPF approximating a total eclipse of the sun. It may be all sorts of things. But one thing is certain: Until three or so years ago, I lived close to a beach only in theory, never in practice.

And then it dawned on me that I lived close to a beach, and I felt — I don’t know — ungrateful or lacking a certain generosity of spirit or just plain stupid for never making the drive. The revelation coincided with the realization that I needed to be a whole lot happier, and standing in the sand always seems to advance that ball. So I began working on Chris. Take advantage of self-employment, I would whisper. Let’s spend every Wednesday afternoon of summer sneaking out of work at 3:30 and heading to the beach. This proposition has had moderate success, if you define “every Wednesday afternoon of summer” as “once every six to eight weeks of summer.”

The problem here is the “sneaking out of work” part. A mere 16 years away from traditional retirement age, I find myself both with work that I love and absolutely no compunction about turning off the lights and shutting the office door at the end of the day. (Why do I have absolutely no compunction about throwing in the workday towel? Chris has plenty of compunction for the both of us.)

He surprised me at 3 p.m. on Tuesday by telling me that Tybee beckoned. The day was cool and overcast and not at all lovely, and in shorts, long sleeved shirts, and ball caps, the two of us went to the beach. We held hands, and we walked in silence except when I was talking, which is to say that we walked in silence roughly 7% of the time.

Tuesday was our 25th wedding anniversary.

I cried all day.

That is what happens when I get overwhelmed by emotion.

That is what happened Tuesday.

The day first seemed to call for something monumental, and we talked a lot about how we wanted to celebrate it. There was a discussion about a trip to Vegas and a renewal of our vows in front of an Elvis impersonator. We thought about a party and surprising our guests with a backyard wedding. We looked into Caribbean resorts, fancy dinners, expensive hotels.

In the end, it hit me that our daily life together had become so sweet — filled with trips and friends and parties and dinners — that I wanted nothing more than to load into our little convertible and drive that dangerous drive.

But this was not quite true, for after a moment of reflection, I realized that I also wanted a ring. I wear three different bands that Chris has gotten me through the years, and they all mean different things to me. And now I wanted a fourth band, which (like all the others) would be Chris’ choice.

So we walked in silence along the beach, except when we didn’t. I offered astute observations about Pro Kadima, the wooden paddles and ball set played for exactly five minutes to appease whiny children on beaches up and down the coast, and opined that in my many years of going to these beaches, I had seen only Amateur Kadima. I stopped to take pictures; we mimicked the calls of the seagulls; I watched everyone walk by. I marveled at how many families left the beach in the throes of a fight. Chris wondered if we would ever have a little house at Tybee. And at some point, as I yammered on about something equally important, I felt Chris fall behind me, and then he grabbed my arm and turned me around.

I would, he began, and he started moving toward me an object grasped in his right hand. I looked down, and all I could see was a small tag that said MADE IN THE U.S.A. As he tried to pull off the tag, he said, I would want you to know that this ring was MADE IN THE U.S.A. That is exactly what I would want you to know.

The band that was MADE IN THE U.S.A. is a slender, plain platinum band. The other three from Chris are much flashier and more substantial, and they were the perfect delivery mechanisms for the messages that they bore. This one was, too. It is quiet and comfortable, and it is a ring very much secure in itself.

And rather than cry even more that day, I took the ring from Chris and removed the tag, and as he slipped it on my finger, he told me what he wanted me to know: that he would marry me all over again.

Our daughter has been fascinated lately about our relationship. How have you stayed married so long? she asks. How have you made it work? I have thought about her questions and our talks a lot lately, and I have no definite answers. I read an essay about how couples change, to the point people within the same relationship feel as if they are in a second or third marriage. (And indeed, that is what one of the flashier rings represents.) I have resisted the temptation to quantify marriage as hard or easy — it has been both at varying times, and sometimes both at the same time — and think of it instead as constant: a series of days with my best friend. I tell her that you get married, and that you think you are in love, and that the years prove that you had no idea exactly of the depths that that word encompassed as you stood at the altar in a fancy white dress. In her least favorite moments of being lectured by her mother, I point at the live oaks lining our street, and how they start far apart and in their own spaces, and how as the years pass, they tangle root and branch. (I know, she says. You always say that.)

Chris and I finished the walk, and we ate seafood, and I toasted the union with the most delicious margarita I had ever had. We spoke of all the changes over the first 25 years, and how, if our good luck held, we would get to watch the changes over the next 25 years, at which time he would be 75 and I would be 73. This seemed as unfathomable to me as the thought of being 48 seemed 25 years ago.

When we got home, I realized that I had missed my father’s second call of the day. I think of him every year on our anniversary, and how expertly he walked me down the aisle, as if he had married off millions of other daughters. Slow down, he said. Not so fast. This is your big day. I can see in my mind’s eye the last photo in the wedding album, where Dad is trying not to cry as the car drives off. We toast Dad every year on our anniversary, for he sends us a check to fund one of those fancy dinners.

I sat on the back steps and returned his calls, the rain drumming lightly on the porch roof. We talked, and I congratulated myself for not screwing it up for the last 25 years, and I told him that if I had the same day 25 years from now, I would be perfectly happy and exceedingly content. My 72 year-old father promised to call me in 25 years to wish me a happy 50th anniversary. I would like nothing more than that to happen, I replied.

And I meant it. After too many years of thinking that a marriage was made in the big moments, it finally hit me that this was it. A drive together. A walk. A plain band MADE IN THE U.S.A. Friendship. A nearby beach. A delicious margarita. The happy wishes of the people you love.

I hung up the phone, and I cried a little more, and then I dried my eyes. There was ice cream to be had — a small, pleasing, and increasingly infrequent ritual — and then there was bedtime, so that the day could start all over again.

ALC

P.S. — Here we are, then (June 1992) and now (June 2017).