And the Seasons Come

The wisps of cold air were bringing the fall detritus tumbling down outside his window. “What’s bitter in the soil is colorful in the leaf”, he remembered having read a while ago. “Alistair Cooke? Yes, that’s it. Smart man, that Alistair, “ he sighed quietly.
“Edward” Dorothy’s voice interrupted his musing. “Edward! When are we leaving?”
“Shortly,” he muttered, resting his finger on the glass before him. Oddly, he just now felt the chill. “In a bit. ”
“You know, I never enjoy these things. You know I never do. And yet, you insist….”
“Yes, I insist,” picking up her train of thought and moving forward with it. “I insist because the fact is…..it is what it is. Please be ready this time.”
Dorothy continued. “ More like “prepared” it seems to me. Yes, “prepared” is better. “
“Stop before you start, my dear,” he ventured. “You know how futile it is to struggle against it. There are things in life that must be done, and this is one of them.”
Edward was approaching a turning point, and he knew it. Mid-life was clicking by on the roulette wheel of life, and the little black ball kept rolling and rolling around in its path, and the anticipation of where it was going to stop was maddening. The guiding stare of the croupier seemed to be glaring at his latest victim with a curious, yet cautious stare, and Edward felt he had lost too much on that game table already.
He looked up from his ruminations and studiously began to rummage about in his ancient leatherette wallet, with the chipped letters on the pocket that reminded him of his humble beginnings. He found, to his delight, a crumpled page he had folded, refolded, only now to be unfolded to read “Nothing is filled with greater joy and happiness than work, and love, exactly because it is the most extreme joy and happiness, can be nothing but work. A person in love thus has to try to behave as if he had to accomplish a major task: he has to spend a lot of time alone, reflect and think, collect himself and hold on to himself; he has to work; he has to become something!”
“Oh, that Rilke,” he mused. Turning the little sheet over, he squinted to see the inscription from his scrawling hand, “guilt is a luxury I can’t afford.” He turned it over, snickered, and then carefully returned it to its place. “It’s all good,” he thought.
“Luxury.” Not a foreign word for a man of his experience, and yet a man who had once in his salad days translated and composed a treatise on a novel about a boy with yellow eyes, a younger, more naïve man who spent days transliterating books on deaf mutes who bandied around tin drums, crying tears of boredom, books about repressed young men that wrote lurid graffiti on bathroom walls. Unexpectedly receiving a grant to study in New Orleans as a result, Edward had been told he was a gentleman, and a scholar, no less by a sanctimonious old codger of the Garden District who hosted him who had told him that there was “a lot of merit” in obtaining an education from a small, unknown institution of higher learning.” He felt more than adequately reminded of that fact that day by the gentleman in question, whose sense of propriety was only mastered by his persistent self-adulation. Seven Presidents in the same family tree was indeed a difficult act to follow, besides the top hat tree in his foyer. The crumbling façade of his grand home and rusty wrought iron filigree spoke more to the reality of his situation, however, then the worn looking servant who appeared during the visit with tea and iced scones. Leaving the parlor, he had quietly whispered, “she made us chocolate pudding last evening for dessert. What a treat!” All this following the tour of the garconniere behind the great house, where he was aptly instructed of the thrills of young bucks and their mulatto gals and their midnight revels. “Ah, those were the days!” the old man chortled in reverie.
All that made him more determined to find his place. And he felt he was well on the way.