Summer is Over and the Carnival is Leaving Town.

We have all heard the hundreds of songs about the last train leaving the station.  Just as many songs exist about the parting of a true love for a distant state or country. Some of the themes are overwrought and some are plaintive.  Gender is not a defining mark of these tales of sadness for the singer might be male or female.  Some songs exist about an era coming to an end or a beloved bar being torn down. But few really convey the sense of loss when good friends, true friends are being scattered  to the four corners of the country.

My sense of loss began a few years ago when one friend, then another and then another retired and fled the place where I live.  Off they went to Florida, North Carolina, Florida and some just stayed here nominally but turned to long and distant travels for their routine. With each friend that called it quits there was a bit of an empty space that was left hanging.  I missed their wit and companionship.  One of my favorite songs of the nineteen seventies is a Dylan tune as sung by the Band, Life is a Carnival. But in the past week the big tent’s poles of the gaudy show have begun to come down.

Eight days ago I was in the middle of a journey from my boyhood home back to the place where I have lived for forty of the last forty two years.  Completed was a farewell visit to two wonderful and beautiful people in a place they loved and had made a home. Soon they will sell this place where they have raised their family and entertained thousands of people. Their going will live a big hole in the world their very open corner lots lives have occupied.

When I say I was melancholy most people these days don’t get the meaning.  As a word it is overused.  Sadness tied to deep thought, that is what melancholy is.  Melancholy isn’t a transient blue moment.  The sadness that is melancholy comes from analysis and introspection. I am melancholy.

Looking out at the lush green trees that cover most of northern Pennsylvania as one travels west on Interstate 70 in the past would have in the past been a cleansing moment for me.  Vacation born giddiness would be in the state of being replaced by a return to the common reality of my job, my home, well the life I lead in Michigan in general. Normally I would be rested and I would be holding onto a thread of hidden joy knowing that in two years’ time I would be returning to this spring of energy for another drink.

Not this time. As the trees flew by I felt lost.

The place of refuge will be gone. My hosts of many years will be gone.  They are selling their house on the bay.  The house two block from the Atlantic Ocean in most likelihood will be gone.  It was not my house but this beautiful pink palace near the sea had been the well from which I had consumed the refreshing waters of the good life from for many years. So many things added together make up why I love being by the sea with people who care about me and about who I care.

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

By the sea the air is different.  Hanging like a sheet that will not dry draped over you as you try to sleep with the windows open at night, your skin always feels damp from its touch. You can both smell the saline nature of the ocean and taste it.  Salt sea air clears your sinuses.  Salt sea air is as potent as a SSRI (benzodiazepine) to calm the troubled racing active brain.  Easy access to my favorite drug, that is the sound of ocean waves, will be gone. Time with two of the greatest people I know will be much more limited.  And at this stage there is less time ahead of me than there is behind me.

When I got back my “family” continued exploding.  Two people who had been there for all the major moments of our lives left two days ago in a crammed full car heading to Colorado. Off to the Rockies they went for their retirement.  We drove her to the hospital to deliver their first child.  They were there to talk us through when our first child was born.  In the old days we drank like fiends and explored almost every nook and cranny of Michigan.  We stayed at rustic campsites and canoed countless rivers.  We drank beer and a lemonade punch that was to die for.  We went to Europe and were rascals together.

As they departed we cracked open a tontine, a cognac from 1964.  We bought the bottle in the late 1980s/early 1990s for $110.  Online estimates for the bottle placed the worth now at about $ 600.  We committed to drinking it when a very major life event occurred. Their departure counted as such an event.

The cork had disintegrated but had been intact enough to keep the liquor sealed in.  After decanting the bottle, we drank a number of glasses and then we pulled out old pictures and talked. We laughed about the camping trip where it rained all the way around Lake Huron as we circled that lake in tents.  We talked about the rafting trip down a Pennsylvania river. Pony bottles of Rolling Rock and Maryland crabs cooked at the campsite were as gourmet a meal as you could ever expect in this lifetime. There were memories of things long forgotten that were shared and fact checked against other memories.

In the morning I had a wee hangover and they were gone.  Left on my lawn was a cone stolen from Michigan Bell 20+ years ago.  The cone and a sake set had been traded back and forth as comic gifts for almost two decades wrapped up in various disguises.  Stupid pranks to be sure but the kind of things people do when they really, really care about each other. The joke was part of a common language drawn from years of experiences some good and some bad but all shared.

On a Sunday morning when I am cooking an omelet at 8 a.m. and brewing two pots of coffee, regular for everyone else and decaffeinated for me, there will come a time when I will think of what to do today and I will wonder are Terry and Barb doing.  Maybe I could mooch a swim in their pool.  Maybe this is a night for a rib dinner.  Maybe we should be doing something else just for shits and grins.  Then my mind will come back to reality and realize they are gone, way gone, to the mountains of Colorado.  Wistfulness and ache.

On a rough Thursday evening after a horrendous day when I wonder what the hell am I doing this for there will come a moment when I need my beloved Atlantic and I will pick up the phone and call Don.  But he won’t be by that big old body of water anymore.  He will have watched the sunset on the usually gentle coast, facing the waters toward the west out that lead way out into the gulf. He will be the same but the connection to what is the source of my soul’s balm the north Atlantic’s water will be available to him only as it is available to me in memory. 

Things are changing drastically as this the summer of 2016 comes to an end.  The carnival is packing up and it won’t be coming back. As I sit here in my back yard listening to the ravens go caw, caw in their prehistoric way I am adrift.  The light is golden and the air is almost perfect temperature wise.  As I look about there is so much work to be done.  Maybe I will bury myself in the small tasks and then the bigger tasks that have been deferred.  I don’t know.  But when I need that extra hand or bit of heart things will be different.

There is a coda to this. No matter how much I feel a sense of loss now, it has been worth it. Without Don and Sue, without Terry and Barb my life would have been much less rich.  I would have been a lesser person.  The colors in the painting that is my life would be flatter and duller. The friendships are not over but they will be different. There is still some cognac left to drink. I owe them all debt I can never repay.