The Longest Ride

long, maybe three or four years, but my hands remained clumsy and I eventually gave it up, just as the Reagan era began. Though the news informed me that debt wasn’t a problem, I paid off the loan I’d used to buy the Picassos anyway. Ruth sprained her ankle and spent a month on crutches. In 1985, I sold the shop and started collecting Social Security; in 1987, after forty years in the classroom, Ruth did the same. The school and the district threw a party in her honor. During her career, she had been named “Teacher of the Year” three times. And in that time, my hair went from black to gray and then to white, thinning with every passing year. The lines on our faces grew deeper, and both of us realized that we could no longer see near or far without glasses. In 1990, I turned seventy, and in 1996, on our fiftieth anniversary, I presented Ruth with the longest letter I’d ever written. She read it aloud, and when she did, I realized I could barely hear her. Two weeks later, I would be fitted with a hearing aid. But I accepted this with equanimity.

It was time. I was growing old. Though Ruth and I never again experienced darkness in our marriage the way we had after Daniel disappeared, things were not always easy. Her father died in 1966, and two years later, her mother died from a stroke. In the 1970s, Ruth found a lump in her breast, and until it was biopsied and found negative, she thought she might have cancer. My parents passed away within a year of each other in the late 1980s, and Ruth and I stood over each of their graves, sobered by the realization that we were the last survivors in either of our families.

I could not foresee the future, but who can do such things? I do not know what I expected in the years we still had left together. I assumed we would continue just as we always had, for it was the only life I’d ever known. Maybe less travel – the trips and the walking were getting hard for us – but other than that, no difference at all. We had no kids or grandkids we needed to visit, no urge to travel abroad again. Instead, Ruth devoted more time to the garden and I began to feed the pigeons. We began to take vitamins, and neither of us had much of an appetite. Looking back, I suppose I should have given more thought to the fact that by our golden anniversary, Ruth had already outlived both her parents, but I was too afraid to consider the implications. I couldn’t imagine a life without her, nor did I want one, but God had other plans. In 1998, like her mother, Ruth had a stroke, one that weakened the left side of her body. Though she was still able to get around the house, our collecting days were at an end and we never again purchased another piece of art. Two years later, on a cold spring morning as we sat in the kitchen, she trailed off in midsentence, unable to complete her thought, and I knew she’d had another stroke. She spent three days in the hospital undergoing tests, and though she came back home, we would never again have a conversation in which the words flowed freely.

The left side of her face lost even more movement, and she began to forget the most common of words. This upset Ruth more than it did me; to my eyes, she remained as beautiful as she’d been on the day I’d first seen her. I was certainly no longer the man I once had been. My face had become wrinkled and thin, and whenever I looked in the mirror, the size of my ears never ceased to astonish me. Our routines become even simpler, one day simply drifting to the next. I would make her breakfast in the morning and we would eat together as we browsed the newspaper; after breakfast, we would sit in the yard and feed the pigeons. We napped in the late morning and would spend the rest of the day reading or listening to music or going to the grocery store. Once a week, I would drive her to the beauty salon, where a hairdresser would wash and style her hair, something that I knew would make her happy. And then, when August came around, I would spend hours at my desk crafting a letter for my wife, and I’d drive the two of us to Black Mountain on our anniversary, where we’d stand by the lake, just as we always had, while she read the words I’d written.

By that point, our adventures were long behind us, but for me it was more than enough, for the longest ride continued. Even then, as we lay in bed, I would hold Ruth close, grateful for the blessing of this life, this woman. In those moments, I would selfishly pray