The Long, Cold Walk
To our invisible valentines
As I write this, snow is falling. Four years ago at this time, snow was also falling. And in the midst of an unusually long power outage in my neighborhood, on the storm's desolate, bone-chilling third day, I trekked to the nearest grocery store on behalf of the Muir household for nonperishable items and hot coffee.
Not surprisingly, when I stepped through the store's snow-dusted automatic entrance, the sales floor teemed with pajama-clad locals who were in search of sustenance as cheerlessly as I was. Panting inside my N95 mask, my caregiver's COVID paranoia on high alert, I hastened my perusals in order to elude contagion, racing through the aisles like a supply runner in an episode of The Walking Dead.
Soon into my foray, my primeval Gen X instincts kicked in. I zeroed in on the sparsely populated canned meats section. Like magnets, my cracked and arthritic hands began to fly to the shelves stocked with the very same unwholesome and calorie-dense substances that had arguably sustained me through childhood. To my adult, semi-reformed eating sensibilities, the litany would have sounded grotesque: Spam, Chef Boyardee, Hormel's corned beef hash, Vienna sausages, Van Camp's pork and beans... truly the stuff that dreams are made of.
Bad ones--and even worse cholesterol.
But how was this happening to me? What was this ancient intelligence disrupting my limbic system and taking me on a "food" tour back through time?
With the rapacity of a starved wolf, I packed my shopping basket with indestructible compounds of sodium, artificial flavors, and preservatives dating back to the dawn of humankind. While Gen Zers frantically foraged around me for non-genetically modified, nondairy, soy-free, gluten-free snacks processed in facilities that did not also process peanuts, I found myself reverting to my feral origins as a latchkey kid at a time when the family car doubled as a nanny and the streets ran wild with BB gun battles.
Indeed, a 10-year-old Charles Muir, pudgy, snot-nosed, and perpetually dehydrated, seemed to have stolen command of this operation, assembling a veritable buffet of UMARs (Unidentified Meat Adjacent Rations) straight out of the 1970s with impunity.
In prosperous times, my barbaric food choices would have constituted an act of hostility in Kara's enlightened enclave of New Seasons and All Things Organic. But we were now into our second day straight without power--an exceptional blow of adversity to the residents of our block. Therefore, upon my return, my wife desultorily approved of the nonnutritive provisions that I proceeded to arrange on the bread board for her inspection... until at last, she discovered one catastrophic omission.
She looked at me beseechingly then, and her hazel eyes, which she had always claimed were too small for her face, went Bambi-wide.
"So you didn't get any discount Valentine's Day candy?" She inquired in almost a monotone, with just a hint of reprimand in her voice.
Discount Valentine's Day candy...
For a long moment, I gawked at my lawfully wedded partner of nineteen years (thirty-two if we are speaking premaritally) as if she had just asked me to jiggle a stranger's baby in my lap. Then I realized what she was suggesting beneath the appended query, extrapolated its logistical implications, and took a self-soothing sip from my already cold, bitter coffee.
"No, I did not," I said, somewhat testily, "and I'm not going back to the store just to get discount Valentine's Day candy!"
"Fine," she said.
Next, and without delay, despite a yeast infection and a chronic abscess that began as a grapefruit-sized bulge in her buttocks that led to four surgeries in the last year (and a fifth one that would arise unexpectedly nine days after this incident), she threw on an Annie Hall-style winter expedition ensemble and trudged in solitude over my own tracks across the snowy, icicle-haunted waste to procure a purse's worth of two-bit Valentine's Day candies... simply because they were priced at a discount.
A tenacious feat, I had to admit, not only on account of her health challenges, but because she ideally saw herself as an advocate of fair-trade, organic, naturally sourced, minimally sugared sweets--not to mention an atheist concerning the concept of the hyper-commercialized lovers' holiday. To this day, I still don't understand what motivated Kara to traverse the Cimmerian steppes of a snowbound Sellwood-Moreland neighborhood while in the grip of two cancer-related infections for weeks-old Sweethearts and Hershey's Kisses.
Nor do I want to understand whatever it was that motivated her. I am all too fond of its madness.
Darkness has fallen since I began writing this. Few cars chug past the house this late at night. Under its layers of hardening winter, the world feels empty and hollow. The snowfall has stopped, the wind is howling, and the sound of driven powder billowing outside my window makes me think of paper crinkling in one's hand.
A dour reminder of the last time--fifty-seven baffling weeks ago--almost to the day--I trekked to the nearest grocery store over hard-packed snow and ice, not to bathe in the primordial soup of my youth, but to pick up my wife's obituary, which I wrote.
An early Valentine's Day card to myself.
Such is the wound of outlasting those you love as you trudge across the tracks they've left behind. From the primitive impulses of life in a pandemic into a wilderness of lost identities that is forever February between snow squalls long after midnight. Grabbing up any chance fistfuls of candy that they would have wanted along the way.
That's the risk, that's the gift of the golden arrow dipped in mysterious madness. It's true, even if it sounds like a pop song.
It's why I first asked Kara out in that same grocery store, thirty-six years ago this May. I just didn't know it yet.
Not all logistical implications should be extrapolated to their furthest point.
Way Back Machine Activate: A brief message from the infusion room
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
That's all I have for now.
Until next time.
--Charles Austin Muir
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