Soulmate

The Summer Wind and the Winter Wind

by Mich

One night in 1984 I showed up at a woman’s apartment in Miami with a bottle of tequila, a bottle of cointreau and a Frank Sinatra album.

She rolled a couple of joints while I mixed the booze in a pitcher and we sat on the bed smoking grass and drinking hardcore margaritas.

We ended up playing one of the Sinatra songs over and over. You tend to do that when you’re high.

Unlike the guy in the song, I didn’t lose her to the summer wind. We were together for thirty-four years, a turbulent marriage but a solid one. In †he end I lost her to the winter wind.

🎶 And now the days, those lonely days, go on and on…

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Work in progress on the road to God

by Mich

Since the death of my wife, I spend my nights drinking gin and watching old movies. In other words, I live in a fantasy world of make-believe and mayhem, depending on the movie.

It’s preferable to the world of reality and the endless grief of living without my life’s companion.

There’s another fantasy world out there — way out there — revolving around the uncorroborated hope that when we die, or sometime thereafter, loved ones and soulmates and husbands and wives will be reunited in a realm or sphere or dimension or phenomenon or heaven or whatever, hidden somewhere in the space-time continuum of the wondrous and unimaginably miraculous universe.

All of which was sheer nonsense I used to think, before I received a totally unexpected phone call last month from a long lost friend from the 1980s when my wife and I lived in Miami Beach.

The friend who called from out of the past — her name is Renata (I love that name) — believes that my “uncorroborated hope” is reality and that it will happen, if one believes, and even, I suppose, if one doesn’t believe.

As far as Renata is concerned, I am a work in progress. All I know is, I’m feeling a whole lot less suicidal than I did before she called.

And here’s the kicker, as an old reporter like me would say, the full name of the person who called from out of the blue at my time of suicidal depression, is Renata de Dios.

If you don’t know Spanish, look it up. And while you’re about it, look up: Dios se mueve de maneras misteriosas.

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