The Last Waltz?
I actually had to look today at the very last time I posted anything on this particular blog.
It was April.
Eight months have passed since I wrote something on what was, once, a daily activity. Okay . . . weekdays, mainly. Weekends were family time.
I need to explain a couple things for you, I think, before I move forward with this post. It’s not something I haven’t stated before, but it certainly is something I think bears repeating.
In October of 2011, just seven months after my wife, Andrea Andrews Manoucheri passed away, I started writing here. It wasn’t to get attention. It wasn’t to feel sorry for myself.
Every night, after dinner was finished, the dishes put in the dishwasher, lunches made, kids in bed, and laundry running I would go to the couch and I was alone. Things would happen, for sure. Bad things would happen. Good things would happen. I would lose myself in those moments and turn to tell my wife and realize . . . she just wasn’t there. Not only that, she was never going to be there again. That was a harsh reality to face when I’d been married for exactly 18 years.
I had a child in therapy. I had expenses and debt and everything was costing me. I needed to get out of my own head and needed a way to do that. I had been told that writing a journal would help. I didn’t like writing by hand so I did the 21st century equivalent: I started to write a blog. My thoughts, feelings, sometimes things that – in hindsight – were a little too personal came out.
A funny thing started to happen more than a year ago, though. Things just started to even out. Things about Andrea would come up and they wouldn’t make me want to hide in a dark room and drink away my sorrows. The date of her death – coincidentally our wedding anniversary – would roll around and I wouldn’t wallow in sadness. Slowly but surely, “our life” turned into “my life.”
Or maybe it was “our life” but not the “our” I was used to referencing. “Our” was Andrea and I, together, worried the kids would leave one day but ready to face life again. Again we would be just a couple, the house a little emptier. Our middle-age years could be spend doing some of the things we didn’t do when we were in our twenties.
Now “our” is more the whole family. It’s me and my kids and trying to make life more of an adventure. We went to places, had graduations, had proms and dances. I started to focus my attentions on music, my first love, and wrote much of that emotion there. My last post was the beginning of that recording session and the singles that have come out so far.
I started dating and doing more things with another person and life went from being good to being something far more. Suddenly my kids are becoming adults and more independent and so much more amazing than I could ever have predicted when I started this textual excursion more than five years ago.
That brings us to the title “Last Waltz?” The “Last Waltz” was the name of the very last concert by “The Band,” a star-studded extravaganza with a Beatle, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and more…and filmed for posterity by Martin Scorcese.
Think of this as my Last Waltz. Mine has a question mark because, unlike the Band, I may . . . probably will . . . come back here from time to time. I’ll have reason to post. I’ll finish that studio record, finally. I’ll have amazing things to talk about.
But the need . . . that basic necessity to just get out of my head exactly what the hell was going on today . . . it’s just not there. Things aren’t routine now, far from that. It’s hard to find reason to shake things out of my head that are making me stop moving forward or just cutting me so deep I cannot function. Things are a lot different.
I write now when the mood strikes, but the writing because I need to write has left me. Maybe it’s writer’s block. Maybe it’s just excitement for the life that’s opening up so wide and bright in front of me. Now things are not, in my own head, worthy of putting print to page. They are not sad or hard or funny or difficult.
What they are is joyous.
And with that joy comes my need to go out and live the adventure.
I hope you understand. I hope you will do the same.
Until next time, TTFN
Dave