Today is our ... let me see, Tin and I married in 1975, and this is 2010, so that makes this our ... 35th wedding anniversary. It's also the 27th anniversary of the filing for our divorce. Since I was working for a suite of lawyers at the time, I did all the paperwork myself, and arranged it so that the decree was actually signed by a judge and made official on St. Patrick's Day. For a while, I laughed about it, referring to March 17 as the 'Tearing of the Greens.' It didn't take long for the punchiness of the joke to wear off, and when my mother died on that date in 1994, all other connotations were blasted to tiny, insignificant pieces. Now, sixteen years later, even that event no longer carries the emotional charge it once did. Being human means that, given long enough, even the most searing pains scab over.
While Tin and I were married, we had a lot of fun. At least it seemed like fun at the time. We had a home, bought a sailboat, learned to scuba dive; we had a dog and three cats. We laughed a lot. Ultimately, though, mere things proved insufficient to hold our fragile coalition together. A terrible automobile accident in the middle of the Mexican desert proved the breaking point for us. I'll admit Tin stuck by me all through my recovery, but once I had healed enough to take care of myself, she let me know that it was time for her to head out in search of fresher pastures. I had no qualms about saying, "Adios." Maybe if I had shown more concern about us splitting, I might have talked her out of it, but at the time, I felt nothing but relief at her decision. It was a decision I would never have made on my own, not because of love or loyalty, but because of apathy. Things were going all right for me, so why rock the boat?
Even if we had had kids, I'm sure we wouldn't have stayed together anyway, and at least as it was, no one else was hurt by our decision. Actually, when you think about it, that statement is glib and hateful, isn't it? Of course someone was hurt by it. We were. Or if not hurt, then changed significantly. Whole life histories were yanked out of kilter and re-aligned. Looking back, I can't say if I would have changed anything if I had known then what I know now. Actually, if the past were that moldable, I'd change where I went to school, and so I wouldn't have met Tin in the first place, and things would have diverged to the point of being unrecognizable.
Having said all that, though, what I'm left with is the unchangeable nature of the past. And since the present is predicated on the past, that's pretty iron-clad, too. Which leaves the future as the only thing we have the option of changing. However, since we can't see past our noses, we really have no say over what our future will be. We can only float along on life's current, and hope we aren't headed for Angel Falls.
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