This Life in our Hands

Sometimes, when the soft morning light sifts in through our bedroom window, I catch her staring up at the back of her raised hands. Tanned, veiny and strong. “They look old, don’t they?” she asked the first time I noticed this. I laughed, then realized she was serious. “No,” I said, “they are perfect.” But I knew what she was telling me. Everything comes here to pass, all of it is just a rental.

We have been together for close to half a century and married for 44 years, most of the time spent right here in Edmonton. When she and I became we, there were a third as many people who called the city home. Like us, the place is more complicated now.

We met in the seventh grade at Stratford Junior High-School, but it was the better part of a decade before passing glances turned into longing ones. For a while, I made up lame excuses to pass by the camera department at Sears Meadowlark Mall, where she worked. Courage born of a few brown stubbies finally brought us together at a house party. We spent most of that night together, first in the crowded and smoky kitchen, and later alone in her apartment where we sat on the couch and talked until dawn. Just talked. She said that, more than anything else, made her want to see me again.

Both of us were students at the U of A then, filled with grand ambitions but absent a clue about how such things fall away, get messily recast and only rarely unfold as first envisioned.

We took jobs, built careers and presently inhabit that strange liminal state called semi-retirement. We travel a bit, increasingly eager to break up the Edmonton winter. We go to Folk Fest, though now only for a day or two, not all four as we once did. Each summer, the hill at Gallagher Park feels just a little steeper. We conceived and raised three fantastic kids. They in turn have blessed us with five beautiful, smiling grandbabies. Who knows — there may come one or two more. They call me Juddy and her Sitty, a fond nod to her deep, rich roots in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. For a long time, we watched friends get married and sometimes divorced. Now, we see them becoming widows and widowers.

Any couple who’ve given love a fair shake can remember the firsts. First date: the Charlie Daniels Band at the Jube. First fight: a sharp argument over politics in the Middle East that got me briefly dumped and taught me how much I had to learn. First time: a long, wide-eyed afternoon in the lumpy single bed of her west-end walk-up, a building that frequently smelled of liver and onions.

The thought of lasts hits harder. Maybe because we never know when, or how, the end of something might suddenly announce itself. Demons surface, shit happens. All these years later, I share only this about that. There were long days when we wondered if we’d make it, and hard nights when we questioned if we even wanted to. We fought through it, found an answer.

So here we are, with greying hair and softening bodies, miles and miles down the river of time, our hearts and heads full of stories only we know, still reaching out to hold each other’s hand in public.